Week 3
This week we watched a recorded lecture from last year’s digital media crowd. The lecturer was Edward Melvin who has been a project manager at ICAN for the last eight years. ICAN is an advertising and digital communications agency, based in Dublin. ICAN is involved in helping its clients “make the right decisions”, (I highlight this because while I believe there are certain ways not to go about attracting new customers but there is no definite way of attracting new business and therfore ICAN can only assist in an advisory capacity), when approching an advertising campaign.
ICAN also provides:
Web design, Multimedia design, Online PR and Advertising campagins, to list a few of thier services.
The main thing I learned from Edward’s lecture was to plan ahead and get as much of a clear idea as possible of the end result of a project from the first development stages as many clients who approach ICAN are sometimes unsure of exactly what they want to achieve.
People choose ICAN because, while appearing to be a small company, they have a reputation of excellence and have been the driving force behind many succesful advertising campaigns, popular websites, etc.
It was interesting to get our first insight into the digital media world and learn how projects are approched from the initial meeting which may take place in ICAN or even in a restaurant, which I found a little strange, but whatever approach brings in new clients I suppose is a good thing right?
As stated before when undertaking a new project ICAN’s clients may already have a specific idea in mind for thier website, advertising campaign, and so on, while some may only have a brief outline of what they want. It is then up to ICAN to develop the idea into a working succesful project that both clients and end users will enjoy. Edward decided to warn us here against the dangers of this as no idea is garunteed to attract new business and clients may not fully appreciate what has been created for them or they may have an idea for the site that ICAN can see failing. It is then up to them to try to convince the client, in a professional manner that thier idea will not work for them the way they want and suggest new ideas to produce a succesful project.
Edward’s lecture was interesting if not a little strange, as it involved the entire creative digital media year one sitting in a lecture theatre for an hour watching a pre- recorded lecture
