MKT5645 Public Relations and Corporate Communications

1. Calamata Corporation wants to determine what kind of debt it should issue, and how much.  The treasurer has built a model to simulate the pro-forma for the firm, and found that the company has significant exposure to foreign exchange risk, specifically, they have mostly US dollar revenues even though the company’s entire operations are funded in Euros.   

1. Assuming the costs are similar, should the company likely fund itself using dollar-based debt, or Euro-based debt?
2. What analysis should the treasurer perform with the pro-forma to determine the correct debt level for the company?

2. Apex Industries has been considering the purchase of 10 trucks to deliver their own products, which would save them $100,000 per year in shipping costs if they purchased the trucks today, and has an estimated present value of $1,500,000. Boris and Fanghua are two  students working for Apex.  Boris suggests that the company go ahead with the plan, since the deal is positive NPV.  Fanghua suggests that maybe they should wait, and re-evaluate the proposal next year.  

1. Provide an explanation why Fanghua may be right, using a numerical example.
2. Explain why Boris may be right, also providing a numerical example.

MKT 5645: Public Relations and Corporate Communications

Super Bowl Commercial Project

Instructions and Suggested Paper Outline

For the Super Bowl Commercial project, you are responsible for analyzing 15 commercials that air at any point during the broadcast of Super Bowl 50 on Sunday, February 7, 2016. The Super Bowl airs on CBS television stations in the United States. You may choose your commercials however you wish. You may choose 15 from the same industry (e.g., food, alcohol, automotive, etc.), 15 random commercials, or even attempt to do 15 commercials from select companies. I would advise that you will not likely be able to find 15 commercials from the same company due to the costs of Super Bowl advertising. The only commercials that you CANNOT analyze are movie preview commercials for upcoming Hollywood blockbusters because those focus on the content of the film rather than the topics of the projects that you are focusing on.

You have been assigned to a project focus either based on your identification of preferences through a SurveyMonkey link or based on random assignment by the professor if you did not indicate your preference. Those projects are either organizational branding in the commercials, inclusion of social media in the commercials, representations of diversity in the commercials, and finally the storytelling aspect of the commercials.

The questions that you will be using to analyze the commercials are available in Word documents that have been uploaded to the course Canvas account. The questions are in Module 4 for each project focus. You should use those questions to review each of the 15 commercials that you analyze for the project.

After the commercials have been watched and analyzed with the project questions, you are to write a 5-page, double spaced paper summarizing your findings. The following is a suggested outline for your paper (on page 2):

I) Introduction (1 page)

--Paragraph stating how you selected your commercials and providing information about them (did they all air during the first quarter, first half, third quarter of the game? What kind of commercials did you review)

--Paragraph describing how you reviewed the commercials (where did you watch the commercials, how did you collect the data, did you take notes on them/use a tablet to collect information)

--State what the focus of your project is (branding ,diversity, social media, or storytelling) and briefly summarize in your own words why that is an important aspect of public relations and for these commercials

II) Summary of your Commercials (1 to 1.5 pages)

--Review all of the commercials based on the questions that you have been provided in Canvas collectively. You can provide percentages (when appropriate) either in a narrative format or tables that you might create in Excel. You should NOT discuss each commercial one at a time to answer the questions. Evaluate them as one large group to see what the overall findings are.

--You should report the findings for each of your project’s questions.

--To help explain the overall, you may refer back to commercials individually and provide qualitative examples of why a commercial was a good representative of your topic (e.g., why was the commercial one that used social media really well, or which commercial had the most compelling story and main character) or why the commercial was particularly bad (e.g., did a commercial have very little organizational branding in it, or was the commercial not diverse and inclusive of the organization’s customer base?). You may discuss these commercials and give your personal reaction to them in relation to the questions that you have been given to evaluate them.

III) Trends (1.5 to 2 pages)

--Based on the commercials that you chose, you should look for trends that may emerge in your data. Did you find any similarities or differences between industries (e.g., did fast food companies promote their social media platforms more than alcoholic beverage companies? Did one company include more representations of diversity than another?).

--You may also choose to focus specifically on particular questions that you have been given as part of your project. For example, you may choose to focus on the main characters of the commercials for the story telling project if you saw that certain characters were used more often than others. Give examples and discuss why you think these characters were most often used. Or, you may focus on which social media platforms were most used or how they were most often discussed and interpret why this may happen. For each project, there are different possibilities on what you may focus on within the questions based on diversity, aspects of branding, storytelling, and social media awareness.

--If you chose to look at commercials across the entire Super Bowl, you could even analyze them to see if trends existed at different points in time. For example, were commercials that aired during the halftime show different than those that aired during the game, or were commercials that aired at the start of the game somehow different than those at the end of the game? The timing of the commercials may be important to how companies decided to buy commercial spots.

--You may even note how your15 commercials were either similar or different from other commercials that aired that you did not review for this project.

IV) Conclusion (1 page)

--Provide your reactions to the commercials from a public relations perspective and your assigned project focus. Did the companies do a good job in branding themselves, embracing diversity, telling compelling stories, or encouraging the audience to engage with them on social media?

--Discuss what could be done to improve the commercials based on what you saw.