Content Creation for Social Media; 6:1 Patisa

Steve kicked year 2 off talking to us all about branding and advertising on social media. These days we’re all on our phones, but what brands have our attention and how do they do it?

We looked at the different types of content. Promoted is usually through product placement etc. sponsored is usually through influencers and celebrities and earned is through the words of netizens.

Our first brief of this term is to choose a non-mainstream food type and earn attention on social media. We must use text, image and moving image over three different social media platforms. Steve also mentioned something about a point system but no mention of a prize so I guess we can skip over that part.

The internet loves food but weird food gets people talking. Gregg’s vegan sausage roll got Twitter all heated up for its release of the oxymoronic food. This is why we had to choose a non-mainstream food. Something people weren’t already talking about and finding a way to get them to.

We have to research our chosen food type, eat the food type, take it out for dinner and a movie, get to know its family, dress up as it for Halloween and post content that could grab attention. If the content doesn’t work, we have to switch it up and try new content that does.

We all brainstormed non mainstream foods as a class and stuck em up on the wall. In the end, my chosen food type became Patisa.

Patisa is a difficult to make, non-bake Indian flaky dessert that has a taste similar to wafer or candy floss. They can be formed in to different shapes and moulds and you can add nuts to them like pistachio. With change in temperature, the strands of the patisa tend to come together making it a bit dense in texture. However, when having a bite, the patisa melts in your mouth and has a wonderful flavour. I grew up eating them and used to call them 'hay' and didn't actually find out till I chose it for this project that it's called patisa lol.

I mocked up some initial ads for patisa that just came to me. I played off this theme that it looks like what it isn't as I used to think it looked like hay that horses eat. I was also reminded of this ad I saw on Snapchat for the Samsung store that uses this concept of "this isn't this, it's this". I also looked at other ads that explore this concept. The story of my food is that "it tastes better than it looks". I'm going to be using Instagram, Reddit and Twitter.

Unfortunately, my graphic skills are still shit.

For our second lecture, we had guest copywriter Jon Ryder who owns the brand fullstopnewparagraph come in and help us explore our ideas and personality as a brand. He told us to think about targeting a specific audience and were shown the campaign for 'Sign for Life' which target football fans to become organ donors.

After some thought, I decided my target audience would be kids because patisa is a messy sweet snack which I thought I could easily appeal to kids as a quirky lunch time food but after I told Steve, he said no because of the social media age limit. So my new target audience became 13+. My tone of voice is to be fun, cheeky and friendly.

I spoke to Jon about my work and he told me to consider because I'm playing on the fact that it looks different to what it tastes, whether I want to be on the audience's side and join their perspective that it looks like an odd food or try to bring attention to an odd food. I also showed him my posters above and told him that I don't feel confident in my graphic skills and that my creative direction doesn't feel worthy and he told me his branding plays off self deprecation and that that could be my angle.