This last week at first didn't seem overly productive but when we sit back and look at it, we actually achieved a lot that will make our lives easier in the future. We were looking at making a rollout plan as I discussed earlier, however we quickly realised as this campaign has been designed to essentially "go viral" the rollout is very quick and powerful so a more valuable exercise for us is to look at the most effective way to use the different media. It was then that we realised that we have talked about which media to use but never with a proper justification and we had sort of honed in on the media without really considering any others. We figured the best way to look at what we are doing is to view our website with the situation generator and all the information as our product, and all our marketing media needs to essentially "sell" that product. In doing this we can form a clear narrative across the whole campaign that leads to the purpose or the message that we are trying to get across. It also helps from a planning aspect as we are able to figure out exactly what the deliverables are so we can essentially make a Kanban board and not miss anything out when it comes to the production phase.

Something else we realised is that if we make the situations in our ads/social media somewhat normal (i.e. late for work?) then it would be totally different to the user generated situations which might throw the user's off but also would form a weird divide between our content and the user generated content that we want to use for social media. So we have decided that all the situations in our media will be generated from the generator so they too are absurd, which in turns makes people even more curious as to what this thing is because it'll be out in the public eye. It also means people will be more likely to want to take part in it as they are given the opportunity to "own their situation" by adding in their Instagram handle, so we can tag them when we post their one, but as all the content will sound similar (and we will put Instagram handles of our mates in the ads) they will be more inclined to add their's too. All of this ends up in a big feedback loop where we have more and more people take part in our excuse generator which results in more and more people thinking about blood donation.

The other key thing was starting to build the situation generator itself and work out how that is going to work, as now it is a very important part of our project. We had different thoughts as to how it would work so the best thing to do was to test the different options with people outside of our group so they could give a new perspective. One of the things we tested was whether or not we give people the situation first and they fill in the gaps or they fill in all the variables and we give them the random situations after. We settled on the first way as the main feedback was that the users felt lost without knowing what they were inputting words for and in the end only 1 word was used so they felt they had wasted time putting the other ones in. Another issue we found was sentences have to be as bare as possible because different things have different pre-tenses. For example we can't say "Dad found you [object]" because the object may be something like "the train home" so that is something we are working around at the moment. Another thing is that because of the nature of the humour we are using, the words we have don't actually need to be funny, it's more of a case of being super specific with the things themselves as you will see in our word lists. Essentially the biggest takeaway I have from this week is that the English language is painful and an absolute minefield.