This project has helped us to apply advertising theories into practice by managing a multidisciplinary project. Our topic deals with human's psychology: postpartum depression. The challenge is lucidly apparent as we have to change the long-standing perception of Vietnamese husbands about PPD. Solving a social issue requires more delicacy and difficulties in approaching our target audience. In addition, working on this project helps us to be more critical by analysing: why people are practicing a particular thing and avoid mentioning or solving an issue. Hence, from the critical analysis, we come up with our creative strategy.
In order to comprehend our demographic, face-to-face and heart-to-heart conversation is vital. We could not just sit back and browse through the Internet for insights. We analysed previous PPD campaigns conducted worldwide to learn from their mistakes. As a result, it is not the “victims” that we should speak to, but the husband which could help their wife through the difficult time.
Asides from the person, we must understand our context as well. Due to specifically cultural sensitivity of Vietnamese husbands, words must be properly chosen or else misinterpretation and social outrage are inevitable. Consequently, difficulties in incorporating new strategies with existing conventional mindset is another obstacle to overcome.
Moreover, sketching the storyboard for the TVC and put it into a real TVC is fundamentally different. While we’re happy with the storyboard and also get approved by the lecturer, the video clip coming from that storyboard is not as impressive as we thought it would be. Hence, flexibility is very important in this industry. We must make changes in order to efficiently deliver the message rather than stick to our initial plan. We have to be more than well-prepared for plan B, plan C etc. and that also represents the package of a professional communicator: hope for the best, but prepare for the worst.
On our way to reach the final stage, there are moments we strayed away from postpartum depression and instead focus on gender equality in family. Without timely feedback from the lecturer our campaign would have a wrong landing on our demographic. Thus, on-going feedback from outside is instrumental for the overall success of a project. Expectation should be mutually managed at the outset of a project. We did consult weekly with our lecturer on the procedure, yet what missing is the lack of consensus on how the outcome would look like. This is a point where improvement needed to be made.
After being enlightened by the insightful and constructive feedback from the in-class pitching to the CEO of AVC Edelman Vietnam, we realized that when doing engagement via interactive booth, it is best to keep it simple yet still reflect the consistent theme of redefining husband as a superman. Besides, although the big concept is “Even a wonder woman needs a superman”, the image of a wonder woman was missing out in most creative executions of the campaign. And the insight of our target audience, despite being clearly identified through research, we barely articulated it when pitching to the client, which led to slight confusion towards the end of the presentation. All these comments were invaluable to our team in terms of industry experience and constant self-improvement.