Integrated Marketing Communications is a class where students are put into teams to run a campaign for the Westerns Marketing Department. My group, Squad 1, produced the campaign, Marketing Debunked, where we answered assumptions and questions about the marketing program to give business pre-majors and undecided students information from current students and professors about the program. 

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Going into this class, I didn’t know what to expect. In my internship at Bellingham Alive, I worked on a short-form video campaign called Business Partner Spotlight, so I had some experience creating a campaign. However, compared to my first experience, in IMC we learned what steps go into creating a campaign, from learning about what the clients problem is, coming up with a solution, pitching our idea to the client, then going through the production process 5 times through the quarter. It was a lot in a 10 week period. 

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Despite how challenging it was to manage a campaign on top of school, work and my personal life, IMC gave me the opportunity to be creative, produce content and work in a team with other creatives. 

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To wrap up my IMC experience, I wanted to reflect on what I’ve learned along the way.

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3 Biggest things I learned

1. How to be Agile
2. Working in a team on a campaign
3. Self confidence

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How to be Agile

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Agile is a marketing approach that focuses on flexibility, collaboration and delivering products in short cycles called Sprints. In each sprint we went through an entire production process, from Ideation to Evaluation.

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Throughout our sprints, we used a Kanban to keep track of all our tasks. A Kanban is a tracking system that sections off tasks in groups of Backlog, Work in Progress, Pending and Done. This helped us know who was doing what tasks, where they were in the cycle and allowed us to communicate visually what we needed to do. For someone who loves To Do lists, this is a To Do list on steroids. I appreciated how items became sectioned off into what’s next, what I’m working on and what’s done. It also made it simple to know who in my group was working on which parts, which alleviated problems. It also held us accountable to doing what we needed to. 

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Overall, my group had many moments where things weren’t working out and had to pivot at the last moment. The second video we produced caused many problems in the production process. Originally, we wanted to do a “Middle Ground” styled video starring current marketing students and the program’s alumni. Because of scheduling difficulties, we had to change the video concept to a react style video with students reacting to alumni’s testimonials. Because of the delays in production, this left us only three days to turn around the video to distribute and promote our product. Together as a team we worked together to finish all our tasks and finished the video on time. It was a stressful time due to all the uncertainty, but through it all we put our heads together to create solutions and work through the challenges together.

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Working in a team on a campaign

When I typically do video work, I’m mostly on my own producing the work and sending it to a manager/professor for feedback. Even when working in groups when producing videos, certain parts were individual tasks within our collaboration. When it comes to most of my creative projects, I have control of when things happen and what I want things to look like. In IMC, everything was a group project in the production process. With group projects and working with people, there’s a lot of factors outside of my control. Because of all the creativity associated with our product, I felt anxious about my work and having to rely on others for help. But going against my instincts and leaning into collaborating with others, we created products I couldn’t have done alone.

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Self confidence

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As someone with anxiety, I struggle to feel sure of myself in group settings. Despite my experience and knowledge in video production, I still felt insecure about sharing what I knew or leading creative visions. Once learning about what we’d be doing in IMC, I saw an opportunity for me to put myself out there, even when it scared me. At the start of the quarter I decided to share my ideas and see if they stuck. To my surprise, they did. 

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Based on the Marketing Department’s target market and goals, I saw an opportunity to connect with business pre-majors and undecided students by creating a video series starring students, alumni and professors talking about the program through the lens of popular video styles. 

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This idea created Marketing Debunked. From this we created videos using familiar video concepts: Middle Ground, Blank Reacts and Real Talk. From our product releases, they have gotten good engagement from viewers. Seeing an idea I had created a successful campaign for a brand makes me feel proud that I believed in myself. 

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Conclusion

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This quarter has had a lot of ups and downs, but overall I enjoyed my experience in IMC. It gave me knowledge about concepts I had been implementing in my work names and structure to how I should approach projects. I got to create some amazing video content I’m proud of and worked with some amazing people. Shout out to Jimmy my Project Manager and my group Anastasia, Brandon and Rahul! 

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I’m also excited to announce I’ll be continuing my IMC journey through Applied IMC as a Project Manager next quarter!