Working at Pravda Advertising

I have recently completed a week of work at Pravda Advertising in Manchester. I worked with James Clancy as a creative team and we were given our own enclosed office to work in with 2 macs and workspace. The agency is very big with a lot of employees working there. The decor is of a different approach to what I have seen before with beanbags instead of chairs, astro turf deck chairs etc. We also had a table tennis table to play on whenever we wanted, aswell as this there was a football table, dartboard and numerous footballs/rugby balls scattered everywhere. This makes for a relaxed atmosphere. On the first day we were given a brief during a meeting on the sofas about a new range of fishing tackle that specifically targets predator fish. This was at the top end of the fishing equipment market. We covered the wall in our office with lots of initial ideas, some of them bad and some good but by the end of the day we had visualised a couple on the mac and had a large range of routes we could have gone in. We then met with the MD to go over our ideas sat on the beanbags. It started to become clear that a number of our ideas were too crazy and shocking for this brand and they were dismissed straight away. However some were picked out as good ideas to expand on. These were the more subtle ideas which we developed the next day aswell as coming up with new ideas.

Myself and James have a tendency to try and go for big crazy ideas and this has taught us that we need to adapt to brands and agency styles more to suit them. This involved toning down ideas. Coming for a graphic design course we haven't really been taught this and this is why we have delved into the advertising sector to get more of an insight. The second meeting went much better as we had come up with some more subtle ideas which were developed again in the 1st half of the third day. These were then put into consideration and we were involved in a meeting for the next brief for Great Rail Journeys. 

Lessons learnt from the previous brief helped steer us in the right direction and after a lot of research we came up with lots of good ideas which we feel were on brief, subtle and suited the brand. On the last day we explored these further before going to the pub for lunch with a lot of the staff. I didn't get to speak to all of the staff during the week as there was so many there but the ones I did were very helpful and made us feel welcome. After lunch we brought all our ideas together and I arranged a meeting with the other creative team working on the same brief. We sat down and talked through all of our ideas and used the process of elimination to get all of the best ideas which we then left for the MD to look over as he had to leave earlier for a meeting.

I still don't know if our ideas were chosen but I have been invited back in to go over our ideas. I was also welcome to work for a second week but unfortunately I had other commitments with the Thousand Words exhibition opening night looming I had to devote my time to that as we had been designing it and James was going travelling. I was then asked if I could come in the week after to work but I had already arranged some work at Mccann Erickson. Hopefully sometime in the future I can go backto work but I will definitely be going back to go over the last brief work very soon.