Childhood and Adolescent Obesity and its Context

The project is to be submitted in the form of a report that includes your account of the campaign and visualisations of what the campaign will look like. You can use appendices for supplementary material relating to things/ideas/campaigns that have inspired you. These and the report comprise the project portfolio. The appendices and bibliography are not included in the word count. The portfolio should all be submitted in a form that can go through Canvas.
Please note: You will no doubt be using material and ideas mentioned in the proposal. This is not a problem, but it must be rewritten.
For this part of the assessment I would like to imagine yourself as an emerging social media campaigner or marketer who is trying to sell their idea for a campaign to an agency that has money to support it. Imagine that I have just put out a call for a campaign on the subject or issue you have chosen to advocate for. You have to convince me that you are the right person for the job. Your report/project portfolio should be designed to do this.
To be successful, you need to accomplish three things:
1. You need to demonstrate you have a grasp of the issue you are campaigning on behalf of
2. You need to demonstrate you have a clear and sophisticated understanding of the nature of communication and user behaviour on social media or social networking sites
3. You need to show you understand what is specific about the platforms you have used and explain how the affordances of each platform will contribute to people engaging with and spreading the campaign.
The report is to be presented as a piece of academic work, in the sense that it needs a bibliography relating to the academic, journalistic and other sources you have used.
Further details relating to the three requirements set out above.
1. The issue/cause and its context
You should give a full description of the cause you are advocating for, as well as the particular message you want to spread and the behaviour you wish to change.
You should demonstrate that you have some understanding of the issues in relation to the current context. So, for example, if your cause is mental health, some awareness of existing provision and problems faced in this area of health provision. This doesn't need to be long, but some awareness of context, relevance, or perinence needs to be shown.
You might also note other relevant campaigns, as well as what they did right or got wrong in your view.
2. Communication on social media
This section should demonstrate your expertise in understanding how communication on social media works.
You might refer to any of the following ideas presented in the media studies scholarship that we have looked at: sharing; networks; spreadability; the producerly text; the gift economy; self-representation; social and cultural capital; the spatial self; competition; collecting; gamification.
You can also refer to the ideas in social marketing relating to: staged campaign process; behaviour change process; the exchange; upstream and downstream marketing.
3. Social media platforms
Here you need to demonstrate knowledge of social media use in relation to three specific platforms.
You can show this through your understanding of a) the users that have adopted the platform; b) the themes of the platform; c) its affordances (what it enables users to do); d) rituals and practices maintained through the platforms.
I need to see that you have a clear sense of the specific role each platform will play in the campaign, and you understand the best kind of content for each one.
You also need to show how the campaign will be recognisable across these platforms. For example, will you link the campaign to a particular colour? Will it have a tagline that will be seen across the different parts of the campaign? Will it have a logo or "brand" identifier that users will easily recognise? You need to show how the different components work together in terms of the content and message, but also visually.
You are free to include material for other media, campaigns, and adverts. This is the sort of thing that should be compiled as part of the report, or included in appendices that you refer to in the report (i.e. see appendix 1).
Please also think about how the campaign will look, so consider logos, colours, fonts. How will it be recognisable it, especially as people will see the campaign on different platforms?
Format:
Please use 1.5 or double spacing in a 12 pt font.
As the design of the report is up to you, you might want to use fonts creatively, but please ensure the main body of the text is readable.
You can structure it however you want, using as many sub-heading as you think is necessary.
Images can be alongside the text (with captions explaining them) or in a seperate appendix at the back.
I would expect to see between 10-12 references, but the better ones will probably have around 15+ (please note that the number of references does not automatically equate to a grade).