Position: Content Creator and Copywriter
10/2019 – 11/2020
As much as I desired to develop my career in America, I ended up leaving for Vietnam due to some personal reasons. It’s a really old-fashioned kind of mindset for a large majority of Vietnamese people to believe that coming back to Vietnam to start your career after a long while studying overseas is a failure. But honestly, it was a choice rather than a failure, and I chose to come back to Vietnam right after my internship with LANtelligence ended in July. A new chapter began three months later when I got hired by Golden A Communication as a Copywriter and Content Creator.
Founded in 2015, Golden A is a full services marketing agency that connects brands and organizations with customers and retailers. Since established, Golden A has been working with companies coming from several industries, which varied from small to large-sized, and from local to multi-national. Golden A has proved to be a rapidly growing firm and the right partner for its many clients by having successfully accomplished various brands’ advertising campaigns and strongly maintained a long-term relationship with its critical clients. For a detail look at Golden A and the service the company offers, please visit:
For this milestone, I will be briefly going through 3 biggest projects I led throughout the entire time I worked at Golden A. What I am going to demonstrate include the description of each project, the steps I took to implement it, my daily responsibilities, the skills I gained, the challenges I overcame, and the lessons learned (hard!).
I/ THUẬN NGƯ (A fish sauce product by 584 Nha Trang) – 1st Project: #
Bibica is among the most critical and long-term clients of Golden A. The company had been working with them on many significant campaigns long before I joined the team. Only about a month or so into my work, I was taken with my team to the meeting with Bibica to get ready for a new branding campaign for Thuận Ngư – a fish sauce product by 584 Nha Trang which was then acquired by Bibica. This time, I was honorly assigned the leadership role for the first phase of the campaign. Driven, motivated, and stubborn, I, as a newbie, quickly plunged into this challenge with much excitement, concentration, carefulness, and very little fear.
The first phase of Thuận Ngư’s branding campaign aimed to raise awareness about the product within 3 months. The strategy was to hit all Bibica’s social media platforms with weekly content posts and introduce Thuận Ngư via online articles published on reputable online sites and newspaper. The key message to be communicated: The traditional fish sauce that makes a tastier and healthier meal for all Vietnamese people.
Implementation steps & daily responsibilities:
- Developed a sophisticated and detailed content plan that included a month- or year-long schedule, depending on the length of the phase, for the posts and articles to be on air for that phase, a strict timeline for the production of the content (the anticipated date and time for completion, feedback, necessary adjustments, and publishment).
- Identified Thuận Ngư’ s targeted audience and developed content concepts that included the writing style, the voice and tone used, as well as content angles to be approached.
- Collaborated with designers to create creative briefs and complete visual designs. Initiated and produced posts whose content was customer-centric and aligned with the content strategy and concepts.
- Worked with account executives to ensure all feedback from clients was in time and necessary adjustments on both visuals and content were final before the posts were ready to be on air.
Challenges and Lessons:
- Spent a certain amount of time developing a logical content plan to better anticipate the workload, ensure on time deliverables, and keep a good track of work productivity. I used to have my team review the content plan I created for the first few times before I excelled at it.
- Handled the conflicts between I, the team leader whom I reported to, the designer, and sometimes an account. Creative is a tricky work when it involves people who have different personalities, aesthetic tastes, perspectives, and mindsets. So, conflicts were common when we could not reach an agreement on one creative work. However, there’s a tip to avoid it my team leader taught me. That was envision the possibilities and impossibilities, and predict possible issues and prepared a back up plan for them. Doing these work prior to implementing the campaign helped ease the difficulty level of the job down for everyone that was involved.
- Took the initiatives and had the ownership of any content jobs I was responsible for by identifying the characteristics of each job and putting under strict control of grammatical accuracy, logical wording, vocabulary richness, informative precision, appropriate content length, and well-communicated message.
- Struggled with the opening for every writing. Crafting a catchy sentence as an opening of a content was always the toughest part of my work, because the first three rows of the post that appeared on the feed of an audience decided whether the audience would want to continue reading the post or not. What I had done to improve this was to read a lot of writing resources regarding topics relevant to my projects to look for a creative idea and unique writing styles which I could learn from.
- Gave and received feedback. I understood that this task had always been the most sensitive one because it could hurt somebody’s ego. I always tried to be very careful with my words when giving a feedback whether it was a negative or positive one. On my end, I’m proud to say that I’m positively open to most feedback because my growth mindset tells me there must be something I can improve. Also, a younger me whose life was full of shaming, negative feedback, criticism, discouragement, and underestimation, taught me that if I survived all of those, not only will I grow maturely but I will survive anything in life
II/ LURICH CONTENT POSTS & FACEBOOK AR GAME – 2nd Project: #
LURICH was also Bibica’s job which aimed to promote their cracker product. LURICH was a large inconsecutive campaign, part of which was the promotion project I led. The promotion was a shorter but more complex campaign compared to Thuận Ngư. It lasted about 3 months (only as long as Thuận Ngư’s 1st phase), but in addition to the content strategy, it involved a landing page and the production of a Facebook AR Game as a mini game to increase customer engagement.
LURICH was positioned as a healthy and convenient light meal for most people at any age. However, the targeted audience for LURICH included office workers who had a long day at work, mothers who were busy all day long taking care of their family, kids who loved snacking, and women who were on a diet program to get fit. The key message to be communicated: A tasty light meal for a healthy and in-shape body.
The goal was to raise awareness about the product while strongly focus on the functions and the benefits it offered. The strategy was to fill Bibica’s social media pages with content posts, advertise LURICH on PR articles, and engage customers with a mini game. In my opinion, LURICH was a more fun project than Thuận Ngư since we designed an animation LURICH Cracker character used for the AR Game and all visuals, which was cute, the spirit of the campaign was youthful and lively, and the AR Game was quite a new and exciting challenge I had ever exposed to.
Regarding the implementation of the content, it was pretty much the same with the one I did for Thuận Ngư, so I won’t be describing it again. Instead, I’m going to elaborate more on the AR Game, which involved mostly the technical tasks and a member from the tech team.
Tasks I initiated when developing the AR Game:
- Discussed with an IT developer the game idea, its feasibility, and client’s requirements. Upon the discussion, two versions of a creative brief of the game were created and sent to the designer and the developer, describing the game’s visual components and flow.
- The visual component designs were then sent to the developer. He would be using them as the game user interface and incorporating them into the flow.
- Many trial versions of the AR game were then tested by all the teams for user experience, responsiveness, errors, and other details.
- Upon testing and client’s approval, the final version would be submitted to Spark AR Hub to be published.
Challenges and Lessons:
Since LURICH AR Game was for a commercial use, it must be strictly compliant with Facebook policies, many of which were under copyright terms of organization’s identity, and the images and background music used. By the time I collaborated with my tech colleague to develop and produce this game, we were exposed to a lot of difficulties when Facebook consistently rejected many versions of the game. We spent days digging into the problem and fixing it, from changing the designs to selecting another background music, before we successfully got approval from Facebook. Since the success of this job did not fully depend on us, we also asked the client to give the mini game a flexible time until it was ready for launching.
III/ BIBICA TRUNG THU (BIBICA’S MID-AUTUMN FESTIVAL) – 3rd Project: #
Bibica’s Mid-autumn Festival was the shortest one out of the 3 campaigns for Bibica I spearheaded. It was also the most rushing one because the project was kicked off within only a month prior to the Mid-autumn Festival that year.
The campaign aimed to promote the Mid-autumn Festival event hosted by Bibica as well as increase sales for the company’s mooncake product. As the event targeted young kids, we used two animation characters to attract our targeted audience. The characters’ image were inspired by Tí the poinsettia – a character from a Vietnamese famous comic series back in early 2000s, and his childhood female friend. These two characters’ role was to tell stories about a traditional Mid-autumn Festival in the past, through which they created a nostalgic vibe to engage customers, incorporated the event information, and promoted Bibica’s mooncake.
Similar to Thuận Ngư and LURICH, all the tasks and responsibilities I took for Bibica’s Mid-autumn Festival were revolving around creating content strategy, approaching different content angles, and utilizing all the skills I’d gained in the creative field to accomplish the campaign.
Challenges and Lessons:
The tougher part of the project leaned toward the design. There was so many images and words needed to integrate into one single visual while that could negatively impact the ads. I spent more time working with the designer on the visuals than writing the content. Brainstorming and searching for creative ideas were more challenging than I had expected, because it was hard to incorporate our own design with the drawing of the 2 characters in a way that made the entire visual look the most natural. However, in the end, all the visuals of Bibica’s Mid-autumn Festival turned out to be the the ones that both I and my designer were proud of the most.
Essential skills I gained from being a Content Creator and Copywriter: #
- Researching: This is one of the most solid and rewarding skills I’ve gained for myself during the time I went to school in America, and I always try to fully apply it into most work and projects I do. As a copywriter and content creator, I utilized my researching skill to search for various writing styles, designs, content trends, knowledge, and important information that could be adapted to different social media content targeting different audience.
- Communication (verbal and written): An effective communication is key to every success, especially teamwork. Ever since I started my first job, I had spent most the time learning and practicing this crucial skill. To avoid miscommunication, I would: never stay silent if I sense that something is wrong, speak up as soon as a problem arises, clearly discuss through all possible solutions with the team, and fix it before it’s getting bigger.
- Presentation: Though I have always been proud of my presentation skill while in school, I learned that delivering a presentation to clients is totally different from doing it in class. Given the fact that one important part of my job at Golden A was to frequently meet with clients and present many proposed advertising campaigns, how to give an effective presentation, to be confident about your speech, and to not lose calm when answering questions raised by the client team were all the most essential skills I learned hard throughout the time.
- Problem solving: In the creative field, a problem can be as big as failing to meet a deadline or can be as small as including a wrong detail in the post, and both extremely upset the clients as well as damage the agency’s reputation. Be professional, have the good will to apologize the client, communicate with the team about the solutions, and set an allowable time to fix the problem were what I learned about problem-solving as a content creator. On the other hand, one of the best ways to avoid the problem is to always plan ahead and prepare plan B,C, and D in advance.
- Collaboration across multi-functional team: Given that Golden A is a full services marketing agency, what we have to offer is as great as but not limited to social media, online PR, commercial video, outdoor event, website, and game. As I implemented an Integrated Marketing Campaign, I had a chance to work with colleagues from different areas such as accounts, media, designers, and IT developers. This was where I learned to collaborate with people from diverse backgrounds who possessed different personalities in the most effective way. For example: be actively communicative to an account and be straightforward and focused to an IT developer, while be flexible to a sensitive designer.
- Proofreading and Editing: This should be top 1 important skill a content creator must have. I believe no content creators would want to produce a poor content, so proofreading and editing can never be missed at the very last stage of the content creation process. To me, a bad and careless content that has no editing work defines an absolute zero work ethic of a content creator.
Along with these 6 essential skills, I also developed and gained skills in Marketing Strategy, Integrated Marketing, Digital Marketing, Market Research, SEO, and Advertising Campaign, etc.
