Team Experience: In My First

¶ … Team Experience:

In my first year of college it became quickly apparent that I was part of a business class that was eager to learn. Our business management lecturer, keen to early on teach us the power of teamwork, randomly divided us into teams and gave us a 30 day project to create the most cost effective advertising campaign to sell a real or imaginary product. The winning team would not only have bragging rights over their peers, but also earn a few bonus credit marks towards their overall grade score at the end of the first semester.

I was fortunate to find myself part of a team whose chemistry clicked from the very beginning. A rapport of mutual respect allowed us to quickly define the task at hand and determine our immediate objectives. I was swiftly chosen as the team leader due to my suggestion for team-mates to remember that we would win or lose together and therefore avoid unnecessary internal competition.

We handled our task as a project consisting of several steps including brief online and library research on ad campaign media, agreement on a product to advertise, and laying out the campaign. I suggested that we all take on the research role on ad campaigns and also come to our first brainstorming meeting in a week's time ready with several ideas on the product we would pitch.

One member suggested we create a closed Facebook group to keep abreast of the ideas at play and have alternating day group chats meetings via our mobile devices; she was instantly installed as the communications facilitator. With her friendly prodding, we also promptly connected via Twitter enabling us to notify each other real-time that we had posted a new idea onto our Facebook group for review. A sense of camaraderie therefore took effect as we found ourselves in frequent and creative communication with each other.

Within the first week, we found out that advertising in the United States alone was a 170 billion dollars plus annual industry. Some of the major ad campaign media included television, radio, print, and the internet. However the internet had raked in the most ad campaign revenues as compared to the others. This was not surprising considering online advertising was available to a worldwide audience in the new global village world order. This fact weighed in heavily at our first brainstorming session to identify the product to build an advertising campaign around.

When we met at the end of the first week, our product ideas ranged from ad pitching for an imaginary dog poo vaporizer spray to a book that would help students improve their memory of studied materials. I suggested that we focus on a product that we could easily sell on the internet, to which another team member highlighted that the cheapest products to produce and market were information products. Such consisted of information packaged in electronic form, ebooks or audio and video files, and can therefore be readily downloadable from the internet.