THE BRIEF
I have decided to mirror the real world and set you up in ‘creative teams’ of 2. This is the standard model in the advertising industry and a better model for graphic designers than larger groups.
Today we will be launching our first brief ‘Stop Loan Sharking’
This is a live brief being tackled by our second years. This is your opportunity to perhaps get your ideas chosen over theirs! You have the opportunity to have your work showcased in front of the client o the 21st February. I will only be showing the very best work from Year 1 and my decision here will be final.
You are to produce an advertising campaign that promotes the ‘Stop Loan Sharking’ campaign.
I want you to carefully consider the following:
The target audience
The key message/s
The call to action
The tone of voice
The delivery method
LOAN SHARK FACTS AND STATISTICS
78% of people think of the loan shark as a friend.
Loan Sharks prey on seniors (age 55+) and single mothers.
There are 686 investigations per year.
There are 92 arrests per year.
Up to 719,000 APR.
A typical low income household could save £500 in debt repayments by going to a credit union or community finance organisation instead.
Loan Shark victims pay back over £120 million a year.
70% of people that use loan sharks need to purchase something essential for everyday life such as a washing machine, school uniforms, christmas presents and some even need it just for food.
My partner and I explored a wide range of ideas but slowly managed to narrow it down by focussing on the points and facts above. First of all we were considering who our target was; were we concentrating on the loan shark? The victim who goes to the loan shark? Or the family of the victim. It would be very difficult to cover all three of these targets but we have managed to cover two of them, the victim and the family.
The image above is exactly what we were trying to avoid, the predictable shark in a suit. At first we considered creating a poster which would follow a ‘two-face’ idea where we would get two photos of the victim before and after one half being happy before they got involved and the second half looking scared with possible bruising or marks to the face, another way of doing this was to use the victim of the loan sharks face alongside their daughter/son which would create more vulnerability and sensitivity however we weren’t sure if this ‘shock’ factor was appropriate for such a fragile topic and so decided against it.
We were hoping to come up with something more sophisticated and practical, something physical that could be out there in towns and cities which could help the victim and even possibly their family. We decided on creating a poster which would be placed on phone boxes. The meaning of this being this phone box can change your life and solve all your problems or even just people with information who can do so anonymously as you can’t be tracked. Also the biggest part of this campaign is advertising the ‘Stop The Loan Sharks’ helpline phone number, so what better place to advertise it than a phone box? We came up with a slogan for this campaign which is ‘inside here is the most powerful weapon against loan sharks’ this piece of text was going to be our main focus. Then we started to consider making the phone box look like a crate with chains on it and padlocks however we thought that would look more intimidating than protective and so we didn’t want to scare people off which is why we went for a simple design.
Chelsea Wolstencroft 