Culture

Third years shape of the future of 'Meet Lincoln'


Third year students from the University of Lincoln’s BA (Hons) Creative Advertising course are playing a central role in the creation of a new marketing and advertising campaign to promote the city as a quality business tourism destination.

‘Meet Lincoln’ was launched by a group of businesses within the Visit Lincoln Partnership. And whilst a main focus of Visit Lincoln is to increase the volume of leisure and short break visitors to Lincoln, Meet Lincoln will focus on raising awareness of the city as a place to meet, host conferences and bring events into the area.

Visit Lincoln Partnership manager, Emma Tatlow, asked third year Creative Advertising students to come up with the 'big idea' to promote Lincoln as a place for meetings and events.

Emma said: ‘Working in collaboration with the University on this project is really exciting. Whilst Visit Lincoln has developed a brand for the city, the students were asked to take this to the next level and come up with a creative concept for business tourism that could be applied to a range of media - such as print advertising, exhibition stands, direct mail and digital executions.

‘The students have thrown themselves into this project and I'm really impressed with the depth of their research into the target audiences and thinking carefully about Lincoln's unique selling points, and how the city can best be promoted to a business audience.’ 


The third year students were given the project as a competitive brief. They competed against each other to produce the best campaign and the staff team selected the best six. The shortlisted six campaigns would have all worked well as different marketing campaigns and they were produced by: Lily Hurst & Will Blackburn (with 2 solutions!); Lucy Eldridge & Ben Williams; Becky Rowlands & Vicky Thompson; Amanda Elvidge & Lily Peters; and Sophie MacDonald & Chris White.

The shortlisted teams presented their proposals to the client panel (Emma Tatlow; Niki Shepheard – Business Dev Manager, Lincolnshire Events Centre; and Creative Advertising lecturers Mike Belton and Gyles Lingwood) at the Old Palace hotel in Lincoln.

 Lucy and Ben presenting to the client panel

 Becky & Vicky present their concept

Amanda & Lily listen to client feedback

 Sophie & Chris explaining their 'big idea'

 Lily & Will

 Lily in full presentation mode

The client panel (Emma, Niki and Mike) deep in discussion 

It was a incredibly difficult decision but only one presentation could win...

It was deceided that Becky & Vicky's idea was the winner. It really captured the client's imagination by using inspiring individuals from the county's past right through to the present day. Congratulations girls!

Now that the Visit Lincoln Partnership have the ‘big idea’ this winning concept will now be passed to a local design agency to develop into a workable design. Once this has been done we will reveal whole Meet Lincoln marketing and communications campaign.

The staff team believe it is really important for our students to work to a real, ‘live’ brief. The Meet Lincoln project gave our students the opportunity of working with a client and practice using their creative thinking and communication skills to solve a real-world, commercial problem.

We have such a pool of talented young people on the course and the work that the students have done on this project will bring a tangible benefit to businesses in Lincoln and Lincolnshire.

Watch this space for when we reveal the final campaign...!