Student’s ad draws attention to plight of poor

SCAD industrial design student Kelly Bignell created this ad for a charity in her hometown — an ad that was featured in that town’s newspaper.

By: Amanda Tower

Published: Friday, June 15, 2007

For a class project, Kelly Bignell, an undergraduate industrial design student at the Savannah College of Art and Design, created an ad for the Community Counseling and Resource Center in her hometown of Lakefield, Ontario, Canada.The organization liked the ad so much that they published it in the town’s newspaper, the Peterborough Examiner, several times.

Bignell took advertising design professor Sean Trapani’s Creative Copywriting class to develop her persuasive writing and creative thinking skills. She said she enrolled in the class with the expectation of learning how to market her own products and designs.

For the course’s final project, students were assigned to choose a nonprofit cause or organization for which to develop an advertisement. Bignell chose to create an ad for the Community Counseling and Resource Center, which helps feed hungry children in her hometown.

“She really ‘got it’,” said Trapani. “She’s a hard-working, thoughtful student who took this project very seriously.”

“When Professor Trapani announced the project, I knew I wanted to create a campaign for a cause back home,” she said. “The Community Counseling and Resource Center is relatively new and I wanted to help spread the word about the great work they are doing.”

The ad features a child’s letter to the Easter bunny asking for money to help her family pay rent.

“Normally a child asks for chocolate from the Easter bunny, but instead she wants money,” Bignell explained. “These are not issues little kids are supposed to worry about. I used the child’s writing and bright paper to catch the viewer’s attention.”

Trapani said, “Writing ad copy is like writing a script: Sometimes you have to write a conversation for a person who doesn’t exist and find that person’s voice. Kelly was able to capture that voice well in her ad campaign.”

The project opened her eyes to a social concern in her hometown that she knew little about. “I had no idea the facts were so shocking concerning homelessness and poverty in the city,” she said. “Unlike the United States, Canada doesn’t have a poverty line; we have the working poor. So when I say poverty it’s not that the children don’t have a place to live, it’s that they don’t have the proper clothing, nutrition, toys or books to help with their growth.”

She said, “Having my campaign published was the most satisfying thing. I had to tweak the ad for it to be published, and the process gave me a better idea about the business context of advertising. The creative idea is extremely important, but it has to be contained so it will still fit with the organization.”

She hopes to create additional campaigns for the center, she said.

“Great advertising is a rational argument wrapped in a sweet, candy emotional shell. It needs to make you feel something,” said Trapani. “Kelly’s ad campaign had all of the technical qualities that cause advertising needed to have, and the argument also had an emotional appeal that really added power to it.”

Bignell said the research skills she has learned in her industrial design classes helped her manage the project. “Industrial design is an iterative process, meaning there is no clear path,” she explained. “You research, draw and build repeatedly until a solution is reached. I used this technique to develop my advertising ideas.”

A captain on the SCAD women’s lacrosse team, Bignell said she enjoys industrial design because it is constantly changing and there is always a product or design that can be improved. She also enjoys how the discipline combines analytical design with creativity.

Bignell said she hopes that, following graduation, she will be accepted to the Institute Without Borders, a multi-year program developed by Bruce Mau that is attempting to design a sustaining, universal and healthy human dwelling. “My goal as a designer is to design the intangible and create a system to improve the quality of life for humans through healthcare and education,” she said.


Tower is a publications editor.