UI 425: Proposal for BIG Project
GW Name: Tanisha Wallace
Option A: Critic (analysis of a campaign)
The following questions should guide your selection of a topic, prompt
your “prewriting” along those lines, and facilitate my early involvement
in the process. To do this assignment, please copy & paste into a Word
document.
GW’s comments:
What is the campaign (political, social, or marketing)
that you’re interested in studying?
The campaign that I am interested in studying is the
marketing campaign of MasterCard. More specifically,
the Priceless campaign that had made MasterCard
prosper.
Why is it of special interest to you? What is curious
about it and how will satisfying your curiosity benefit you?
This campaign is of special interest to me because it is one of
those campaigns that me, as an advertising major, hopes to
one day be able to pull off. It is curious because off all of the
different target audiences that the commercials and ads can
appeal to, and it will make it easier to write about it if I am
truly interested in it.
Why should we be interested? In other words, what
do you expect we will learn about persuasion, as a result,
and how will it be significant to our lives / living?
It think you would be interested because it not only tells
about a successful advertising campaign, but it also tells
how a struggling company was pulled out of the “depths
of despair” by the campaign. The first commercials were
fairly straightforward and low key, but soon branched into
humor, drama, pathos, and many other emotions. This is
the point – the campaign is rooted in emotion. It's no easy
task to tie a credit card so closely to emotion. My personal
favorite is the family riding the roller coaster at an amusement park. The admission fee. The parking. The food.
Seeing your Dad scream like your little sister? Priceless.
Where will you gather information, and what difficulties
should you anticipate and how will you handle them?
I will gather information from advertising websites, articles, and
other sources that mention and/or evaluate the campaign. About the
difficulty I can think of is distinguishing what is a reliable source,
and what isn’t. I can overcome this by making sure that if I use
something from the Internet, that it is from a reliable source. This
is really the only way that I can combat this issue. To do so, I can
consult the “research tools” section of Kent Library’s homepage,
which offers pointers for evaluating content found on the Web.
Annotated Bibliography
Anderson, Mae. "A Priceless Promotion." Adweek 22 Nov. 2004: 24-25.
This article is about how the person in charge of MasterCard’s priceless campaign
for McCann Erickson in New York deals with people and their ideas…some not very
good. She will soon be the Chief Creative Officer for the company.
"MasterCard ‘Dog Trilogy." Creativity April 2005: 28-29.
The article discusses a commercial created for MasterCard. The enduring
"Priceless" campaign tripled with intensity in this series of spots that debuted at the 2004
Oscars, telling about a lost pup who gets separated from his family and encounters
various do-gooders during his journey back home.
"Cut to the Chase." Advertising Age's Business Marketing 8 Nov. 2004: 34.
This article is about how celebrity spokespeople and business to business
marketing had a role in the Priceless campaign.
Farrell, James J. "Priceless." Clergy Journal Sept. 2004: 13.
This article analyzes the advertising strategy of credit card company, MasterCard
International Inc. Concept of the company's advertisement. It also talks about ways by
which the firm promotes the idea that not everything can be bought by money. Lastly, it
tells the reasons why the advertisement of MasterCard is effective among consumers.
Janoff, Barry. "Homer's Odyssey Is a Credit to Spending." Brandweek 2 Feb. 2004:
36.
This article deals with the Priceless advertising campaign of MasterCard created
by McCann-Erickson, New York. It includes a description of the television advertisement
featuring cartoon character Homer Simpson.