1. COM 422 – Seahawk Mail
Print Advertisement
9 March 2011
Danielle Dorantich
Dana Purvis
Maegan Bendt
Melissa Gagliardi

2. Based on our client interview, we saw that getting students to rent commuter boxes was
of the upmost importance to Seahawk Mail. Because of this knowledge, we have created a print
advertisement that focused on UNCW Students. When choosing between our two publics, our
group discussed that we pay more attention to print advertisements than a brochure. In addition
to this, there is a much vaster public in students than faculty.
The objective of the advertisement is to increase the number of student commuter box
rentals by twenty-five between August 2011 and May 2012. As we discussed in class, the
message is directly related to the objective. The message is defined as the basic idea we want the
audience to remember as a result of receiving our communication, which in this case is our print
ad. The message for this campaign is that moving is already such a hassle—just because you
move doesn’t mean your mailbox has to.
We chose to take a lot of pictures in different poses. In the pictures we wanted to convey
our message ―Just because you move doesn’t mean your mailbox has to.‖ Our initial idea was to
tie our model to the mailbox making it look like a ―ball and chain‖ concept where he didn’t want
to part with his mailbox when he moves. Once we started taking pictures and working with
different angles, we got more creative and had him sit on top of the mailbox. With him on top of
it, it creates more of an emotional effect because his expression is one of sadness and longing.
We then had to narrow our picture options down because there were a couple of strong poses.
To create our advertisement we decided to use Adobe Photoshop because Melissa knew
how to fix and edit photos with the program. She had some knowledge of photo editing on
Microsoft Publisher and originally thought that we could use only that program. Once we took
the picture we realized that the colors of the background were too sharp to add writing over so
we decided to blur it. Once we knew that we’d have to use the blur option she suggested

3. Photoshop. We started working with it and were confused about how to get started. It was
difficult at first but then we figured it out.
To find out more information about printing advertisements, Dana went to Dittos to find
out how much it would cost to print our ad in color. The employees at Dittos informed her that it
costs twenty-five cents per side of a color advertisement. This is based on a standard size flyer
which is eight and half by eleven inches.
One of our group members, Dana, is a Disney Campus Representatives at UNCW. As
part of the marketing campaign for Disney, the group of reps was required to distribute two-
hundred and ten posters on campus. Due to space issues, our group member had trouble
distributing that many advertisements on campus. Based on this experience, Dana recommended
that we print fewer advertisements. We discussed the number of buildings on campus and
decided that to place ads in each building we would need to print approximately one hundred and
twenty five color flyers. Our group calculated that at twenty five cents each our flyers would cost
thirty one dollars and twenty five cents to print.
Once we budgeted how much it would cost to print our ad in color, we moved on to
exploring other ways to market our message. After extensive research our group decided which
publications would suit the needs of our message. The names of the publications we would like
to place our print ad in are the online version of The Seahawk student newspaper, and in Lumina
Theater.
According to page three of the advertising information link on the Seahawk’s website,
Eighty eight percent of UNCW students claim they read online newspapers. The online version
of the Seahawk student newspaper has an average of twenty-five thousand four hundred hits per
month. These statistics justify placing our ad in the online version of the Seahawk. We looked at

4. the options, and decided that our ad would be conveyed best in the ―Medium Rectangle‖ format
which is three hundred by two hundred and fifty pixels. The medium rectangle costs twenty
dollars per week. The point of our ad is to sell commuter boxes. Students are most likely sign up
for a commuter box at the beginning of a semester because they have already solidified their
residence off campus. As a result, we feel that it would be most effective to market this ad in the
Seahawk for four weeks at the very beginning of the semester. This would bring our cost to
eighty dollars to advertise with this particular publication.
According to page seven of the advertising information found on the Seahawk’s website,
seventeen thousand one hundred and eighty three film goers viewed ads at Lumina Theater from
2009-2010, we felt this was prime real estate to share our message. Lumina Theater shows a
wide range of foreign and domestic films throughout the week which draws a diverse crowd of
students. As a campus office, the rate to advertise in Lumina Theater is one hundred and twenty
dollars per month. Our image will run at least three times prior to the start of a show for the
duration of a week from Monday through Sunday.
Through our research of different publications we feel as though the online version of the
Seahawk and the Lumina Theater are the most cost efficient and effective methods outlets for
our advertisement. As UNCW students we needed somewhere that would be convenient to print
our ad so we chose Dittos to do this. After hearing that the price was reasonable we did not feel
the need to look elsewhere because that cost fit into our budget. The ad correlates with our
client’s needs and portrays our message because it focuses on the advantages of the commute
box.