Jonathan Mildenhall Lecture on Creative Excellence
In his lecture, Jonathan Mildenhall described Coca-Cola’s “Open Happiness” campaign as a call to action and emotions. He recognizes a profound connection between emotion and action. First of all, Mildenhall states with definitiveness that emotions drive rationality. An emotional appeal is thus more profound and more likely to change behaviors than an appeal to reasoning. Second, Mildenhall also declares that the best advertising provokes a strong emotional response. Whether the response is compassion, disgust, or laughing out loud is what constitutes a better piece of advertising than any other piece that may be skillfully designed and deliver unquestionable facts but causes no emotional reaction. The two things declared by Mildenhall comprise the two principles of emotion-based storytelling in advertising. Also, Mildenhall mentions that there are two main driving forces for humans: happiness and safety. According to him, Coca-Cola employs the themes of happiness in its advertising efforts to one of the greatest extents among all international brands. It is believed that people are more motivated to act in a certain way, such as consuming particular products if emotion-based associations with these products are built, which is to be done by advertisers and marketers.
Raquel Hunter’s Speech on Digital Media
Raquel Hunter’s general message was that social networking services and communities existing there not only reflect culture and society to a certain extent, which they certainly do but also shape them in the modern world. In communication studies, social media are not regarded as mere entertainment: they are instead environments where information is continuously generated, shared, and responded to, which shapes the informational reality for users, i.e., how they see the world. In marketing, it has been acknowledged that online communities represent accumulations of opinions, interests, traits, and attitudes that impact the market. That is why they need to be explored and studied to understand the needs of consumers. A way to do that is by using online analytics. With her significant experience in various industries, Hunter demonstrates that online analytics is something from which businesses in virtually every sphere today can benefit. Although there are complications with applying analytics tools to large amounts of human-generated content, these tools still demonstrate an impressing capacity for moving businesses forward by discovering demand, collecting feedback, and understanding consumers.
Comparison of the Talks
Not to take away from the importance and usefulness of what Hunter presented, I found more useful information in Mildenhall’s lecture. His lecture was dedicated to concepts and theory, unlike Hunter’s more practical talk, but I still felt that what Mildenhall told was more helpful. The reason is that he explained several things about how marketing and advertising are performed by one of the world’s most successful companies, and it provided an insight into how businesses run successful communications in general. Two particularly insightful things are the concept of creativity and the idea of emotion-based storytelling. The latter is outlined in the first paragraph above. The former was one of the focuses of Mildenhall’s lecture. He repeatedly stressed the importance of creativity to emphasize that coming up with something new is pivotal in business development. It is not enough to perform adequately or comply with existing requirements; it is necessary to see what everybody has seen and think what nobody has thought, which is precisely the definition of creativity.