BM3503

This assignment was both one of the most enjoyable and the most frustrating to complete at the same time. Due to workloads and extended periods of overlapping annual leave at work, I decided to apply for a deadline extension through mitigating circumstances. This initially felt like a precaution, but it turned out to be necessary, so I am extremely glad I decided to do that. It was disappointing to be put in that position to begin with, but with the benefit of hindsight, these events gave me the opportunity to work for longer periods of uninterrupted time, and on consecutive days as well – which wouldn’t ordinarily be possible, and I feel like this has helped me significantly.

There were other challenges too – quite early on I had decided on my campaign being based on an Apple Maps optimisation service, tied to the much-hyped release of Apple Intelligence across iOS devices. I was excited to explore this opportunity and I had a fully invested team behind the idea, with my manager keen to offer the service which she saw as a natural up-sell opportunity for our existing SEO customers, as well as a standalone service we could offer to potential new customers. In preparation, we successfully registered and passed Apple’s verification procedure to allow us to function as a third-party agency on behalf of other businesses on their platform, and engaged in a trial with a select number of existing clients. This trial was designed to see if specific actions performed routinely month to month on a Google Business Profile, such as updating images, posting update and responding to reviews produced any measurable performance boost that we could use as a proof of concept to bolster this campaign’s messaging. Unfortunately, management lost patience in March and decided to terminate the trial, and although I felt like this was a premature decision, at around the same time Apple had released Apple Intelligence to their UK customers and it was evident that it was sadly underwhelming. Importantly for me, an enhanced, conversational version of Siri, Apple’s voice assistant – that was a key component of the reasoning behind this campaign idea – had not materialised in the release. Shortly after, also around the beginning of March, reports started to circulate that Apple had “indefinitely delayed” an advanced Siri, potentially until 2027 at best (Macworld, 2025), and as a result we cancelled the campaign.

This was a disappointment, not just because of the initial excitement, but it also meant that I would not benefit from the experience of running the campaign, or from the outcomes it would produce, especially those that might drive optimisation decisions I could use in my work. It also presented a challenge when it came to considering recommendations, which in an ideal world would have been largely based on these experiences. I therefore shifted to creating content theoretically using mock-ups, and based my recommendations on new learning, especially when there were differences between that and what existing practices Brandwin use.

Lastly from a challenge perspective, when I started to build out my portfolio, I chose to do so using PowerPoint, but struggled to present my work within its restrictive, clunky interface, so I opted instead to present this portfolio as a webpage, which gave me the freedom to present it in a manner that closer aligned to how I visualised doing so at the outset and although I don’t regret the decision, it brought a few unforeseen consequences. I found myself spending much longer worrying about what the portfolio looked like from a visual perspective, tweaking things like colours, theme elements and fonts, things I wouldn’t have worried about so much otherwise. I had also not considered the added complexity of optimisation for varying screen sizes, which would be a normal practice for client facing work but was initially an uncertainty I needed to address. Writing directly onto a webpage also denied me access to the usual spelling and punctuation tools, so I’ve had to work around that by using less efficient methods to check my work.

Despite the challenges, one thing that I think will work well is the use of a draft campaign calendar that maps each stage of the campaign to a stage in the buying journey through the AIDA framework. I feel like this gives the campaign structure at a point before any content is created, which allows for us to visualise how messaging needs to evolve as the campaign progresses, especially across multiple channels. This element has also triggered some onward thinking about how this approach could effect future campaigns, and how we could use it to adapt campaign progress by segmenting audiences along the way, depending on how they engage (or don’t). For example, if an individual engages with content in stage one, they progress to the next stage of content, however, for people that don’t engage with content at stage one, perhaps they could then progress to a retargeting stage where the messaging is still aligned with stage one goals.

I have also gained a fresh perspective on the way I consider keyword research results, especially how I value keywords that do not have any or minimal search volumes attached to them. Normally we might be dismissive of these keywords, but in this case where the subject is an emerging trend, I needed to think about whether or not these volumes would rise in the near future, and the benefits that could be had competitively by ranking for them in advance of any eventual volume and difficulty growth.

Finally, I have given thought to what I might have done differently, and what I might have done next if the campaign had gone live. Both questions are difficult to answer without the benefit of real results, but I now realise that I probably had enough time to try and come up with an alternate campaign idea once it became evident that this campaign would not run. I ultimately decided that I would struggle to come up with something that genuinely offered a similar level of real-world promise – nevertheless, it would have been interesting to explore that possibility even if purely to gain some real-world experience and feedback. Choosing to continue on a theoretical basis does feel a little like a missed opportunity, as I am yet to run a campaign of any sort in a real-world environment. Ultimately though, the process of development this campaign has given me greater confidence in my ability to create a strategy and a campaign that offers genuine, real-world opportunities for when that time eventually comes.