And so it begins...

Well it's finally here. This morning we had the briefing for the end of year project on my masters. The class are split into two separate 'agencies' and given a real brief from a real client. Then for 6 weeks both agencies put all that they have learned over the past 8 months into practice and develop an integrated advertising campaign. On the 9th of June (a date for your diary if there happen to be any agency folk reading this) there will be a very daunting presentation to roughly 300 of the movers and shakers from the advertising industry in Dublin. It's a bit intimidating, but all very exciting.

Every year this is the most exciting part of the course and realistically this is what we've been looking forward to since we began last September. The client for the project is always top secret information right up until the day of the briefing so there was a lot of suspense and anticipation floating about over the past few weeks. There was also quite a lot of speculation, I even dreamt last night that the client was Bostik glue and that we were given a tour of their factory as part of the briefing, it was all very random.

Thankfully we were put out of our misery this morning and for the next 6 weeks we'll be working on a campaign for the Road Safety Authority. I don't think I'm supposed to be keeping schtum on what the actual campaign is but I won't mention it here just in case. I'm really excited about it though, it's a great brief and something that we can really have fun with. It's also nice to work on a campaign that will hopefully have a positive societal impact.

It's all very real now that it has started and we're literally hitting the ground running. The next few weeks will be spent intensely researching - oh how glamorous - and then after that the real fun of the creative work begins. I spent a lot of today looking at road safety campaigns from all over the world (one of which I'd already posted about here) and there's an awful lot of great stuff out there, and a fair amount of terrible stuff too. I'll most likely post some of it here over the next few days.

It's a very tricky and challenging brief. As I already mentioned when I previously talked about public service advertising it's hard to avoid being too preachy and talking down to people. It's also very tempting to just go for the shock factor but that's not always the best technique and the real challenge is to create something that people will actually care about and will encourage them to change their behaviour. These are all challenges that we'll be facing over the next 6 weeks and I'm honestly looking forward to them, for the moment at least. But for now: let the shouting begin.