• by March 15, 2006

A new voice, unpolluted and idealistic. A voice full of nerve and grit. For the next few months, graduate students in the Creative Media track at the Virginia Commonwealth University Adcenter will contribute their views on the future of the business to Media magazine.

So far, we've learned that creativity doesn't occur on demand. It springs from a combination of previous experiences, insights, and inferences. To best serve your media plan, you need to know more than the number of eyeballs reached and the findings of behavioral studies. You need the ability to draw creative inferences.

Many of our projects at VCU deal with the form of media as the creative palette. Often the unique use of a medium creates as much impact as the message itself. Look at what Weiden London did with Google Maps for Nike's Run London campaign. It directly involved the target while promoting the product. There are powerful mash-ups here just waiting to be created.

Creative media planning goes well beyond quantitative approaches to media analysis and measurement. It's about applying personal experience and creative inference in getting a message out to the target audience. It's also about being able to marry the numbers we know and love with experiential insights. We look at the art and science of media as if someone gave us a creative execution to share with the world, and we are charged with finding the most innovative and logical ways to spur creativity using technology and other tools.

Want to hear more? Better yet, want to hire us? We graduate in May.

by Mike Karnjanaprakorn, Josh Brandau, Kerry O'Connell, Kumar Kanagasabapathy, and Chanda Johnson