respond toone of the
assessment topics
in theassessment format, explaining your methods and topic context, and providingone or two recommendations.
Politicising WeChat
Relevant Course Materials:Platforms, Advertising
Context:In recent years, WeChat has removed targeted advertising from its Australian version of its app, claiming that the ROI was too low to continue. This created a problem for Australian politicians seeking to connect to their followers on WeChat. The few Australian politicians on the platform have either paid for WeChat Official Accounts, paid for so-called ‘native content’, or have simply bought in-article ads in news articles. Few are satisfied with the result, despite some spending tens of thousands of dollars a day on advertising during the electoral period.
Client:An Australian political campaigns consultancy.
Client’s position:The consultancy is seeking advice on how best to approach advertising for political candidates on WeChat. Recognising that WeChat users are unlikely to shift to other platforms,you need to produce a white paper with proactive recommendations for the company about how Australian politicians can use WeChat to engage with WeChat users.
Overview
For theindustry white paper assessment, you will be writing a mockup of a white paper, as a formal response to questions from a mockup client.
This assessment uses aspecific format, and you are required to use this format to complete the assessment. Each heading for the assessment has a different section of this guide for you to refer to as you complete the tasks.
The assessment topics are built from real contexts and current events.You will need to gather the evidence yourself from news articles, grey literature, government and corporate documents, social media, or any other sources that you think are relevant to the task at hand.
White paper? Case study? What do these words mean?
Awhite paperis a specific kind ofdocument formatused for conveying recommendations to government, to NGOs and community organisations, to business and industries, and to the public. A full white paper can be over one hundred pages.Your white paper will be much shorter.
White papers areevidence-based. This means that being able to gather evidence and show how you've gathered evidence is important. Because of this, there is an expectation that you explain how you found your evidence. The longer explainer forwhite papers is here, along with some examples of professional white papers.
Your white paper will be written using thecase study method. Case studies are used in all different kinds of fields for assessing legal events, medical situations, business decisions, campaigns policies, and many other areas. The case study method is very flexible because it can use all sorts of different kinds of evidence to study a circumstance. For this assessment you can use social media posts, newspaper interviews, government or corporate data, commentaries, explainers, and all sorts of information to present your 'case' - you just have to justify your choices.
The focus of the case study method is on makingeffectiveuse of all sorts of published evidence to understand acomplicated situationand then write an overview of the situation that reconciles all sorts of complicated information. Because they are flexible and focus on finding and interpreting found data, a case study can respond quickly to a complicated situation.
connects to the unit outcomes regarding “analyse and critically reflect upon areas of industry and community life where the study of the media is applicable and relevant” and “formulate and present solutions to research questions.”
Each of the topics that are available connect to different parts of the course, and you can use this to decide on which topic you're going to respond to.
The emphasis of this assessment is on:
- Building on your abilities in reading and evaluating written materials, as per Assessment Three: Contemporary Research
- Clearly demonstrating your research process
- Demonstrating a capacity to find appropriate resources and understand their relative value
- Making evidence-based, actionable and clearly-justified recommendations from research.
The questions for this assessment cover recent events in digital media industries that are still ongoing. Events may occur after you submit that could be contrary to your claims in your submission. Do not worry about this – what matters is the information you gather and the ideas that you are able to justify.