End of the PGD Phase….

Well where on earth did the time go! It doesn’t seem like 2 minutes since I was writing an end of phase report for the PGC phase.

I have found this stage of the MA challenging, frustrating, enjoyable and downright hard work! I have learnt the importance of knowing the visual language of the area you are looking at in order to communicate to your target audience. I started off the phase by deciding what I wanted  to do for my project. I have decided to create a walking pack and viral campaign for walks around the Roaches and Luds Church in the Peak District.

I have been up and down this semester (again I know!) With my original designs and ideas not really suiting my project. Eventually I found my theme and narrative by developing the map that will go with the walk. From there I have gone on to create my walking pack idea into a doable piece of work…but there was one problem, the viral side had taken a bit of a back seat and whenever I was trying to create a viable strategy for it I ended up with too much stuff. Since the work in progress presentations I have managed to narrow this down to something much simpler, but I believe its going to work quite well for my target audience. feedback received from tutorials and the presentation reminded me that I was in danger of losing focus. I hope now that I am back on track.

The hiking community in general are very social both on and offline and I found my browsing the forums that they are very willing and eager to share stories, information and experiences about walks they’ve been on and areas they’ve visited so this made me think that they are a good choice to release a viral out on.  I’m keeping it simple. I am going to create direct mail invitationals to send out to key people in the hiking community such as walking group leaders etc. I will also produce some promotional materials to go along side that will be left in pubs, tourist centres, youth hostels etc surrounding the area. If I get to a point where I feel I can release it to the public to test it, I will try and involve the landlords and shop keepers. The second stage of my viral will be creating a persona for one of the myths of the roaches. Most likely Jenny Greenteeth, resident water nymph of the Doxey Pool and create social media pages posing as her. I was thinking about this a few weeks ago but never gave it another thought. Just the other day I was watching The IT Crowd on 40d and one of the ads in front caught my attention. It seemed like a viral video, and by doing some further research I realised that it was for Kensington palace. they have recreated one of the stories from history of a feral boy named Peter coming back to the castle and causing mischief. They have created a facebook page and a twitter account for him, both of which I plan to do so a little gutted it’s not that original anymore but is a good insight to a live campaign to follow. It was only, launched on the March 11th so it’s still very new, and it will be interesting to see how it progresses.

You can see the first video here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSOeHsyPcI0

The website here http://www.standingstill.co.uk/peterthewildboy/

and someone who came to the same conclusion I did here http://adamanddan.wordpress.com/2010/03/18/peter-the-wild-boy-kensington-palace/

Anyhoo time to get this bit finoshed off. I feel this term has been a bit rocky but feeling like Im finally making some progress, all I have to do is try not to lose focus again, and hope I pass the PGD phase…

Good luck everyone!

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