In my second year at Uni, I was set a task by the advertising agency EHS Brann, to create an advertising campaign for Barclays Business Booster. The objective set in the brief was to raise awareness of their Business Booster and to get people wanting to start up their own business to apply.
The chosen idea, was to create a board game which could be sent out as a direct mailer. The game took the user through the different stages of owning a start up, growing company, from receiving Barclays £50,000 start up money, to advertising your business and hiring staff as the company grows.
The original idea for the game was to have different jobs that people may chose do, such as start an accountancy firm, a graphic design company, a tea house, florist etc, however the issue with that idea is that it wouldn’t be possible to cover all the jobs on the board and I didn’t want to seem like it would be alienating those who wanted to do a job that wasn’t featured. So the life of a company seemed like the better way to do it.
As you can see, the game is a take off from Monopoly. The aim was for people to actually play the game if they chose to when it came through the door, so it was important to base it on a game that everyone knew how to play, with simply rules, becuase people wouldn’t take the time to learn how to play it otherwise.
I also created ‘Money In’ and ‘Money Out’ cards, which acted as ‘Chance’ and ‘Community Chest’ cards. The Money Out cards gave examples of typical business expenses such as accountant fees, bills, training staff etc, while the Money In cards showed the perks of having your own business such as winning awards, good review in the paper which helped to draw in new business etc.
A print campaign was also created to work alongside the direct mail board game. The first idea was to make the print ad look like it’s an oversized Community Chest card featuring the Monopoly man, to help tie the campaigntogether. However, I didn’t feel the campaign was very strong, so I created a new ad campaign.
This was the chosen final print campaign, designed to look like the Monopoly Property cards, showing the stages of a growing business, from being your own boss, to moving out of the home office, into a real office. However, when I presented this idea to the agency, there was talk that the first campaign could be released as a ‘teaser’ campaign before releasing these ads.
This is the final product, complete in a fully designed box, with lid, the direct mailer consisted of cards, game, money and an instructional leaflet which told people how to play the game and information about the campaign.
I’m really pleased with the final design, it was a lot of work, but as a prototype the end result turned out really well and has had a a lot of interest from other businessness, which is exactly what I was hoping for.
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