Note: Each year, to try and sell and promote our upcoming yearbook, my staff and I, wrote, planned, sang, danced, and recorded parody videos for our community. These songs ranged from NSYNC’s “Bye Bye Bye,” Mariah Carey’s “All I Want For Christmas is You,” Justin Bieber’s “Mistletoe,” and Taylor Swift’s “Look What You Made Me Do.” While my voice isn’t as beautiful as a Mariah Carey or Justin Bieber, the videos did give our student body and their families a reason to smile and laugh and a reminder to purchase a yearbook. Each time we released a video, yearbook sales sky rocketed, selling at least an additional 100 yearbooks that week and even more after that.
“Look What We Made You By” was released on October 16th, 2017 for the promotion of our upcoming release of the ‘Because It Is’ yearbook coming out in May of 2018. The song was a parody of Taylor Swift’s, “Look What You Made Me Do” and even features a slight hint to viewers of our upcoming theme.
“I Want A Yearbook, Yo” was released December 18th of 2017, and gave a holiday spin off to our music videos, using Justin Bieber’s, ” Mistletoe” to inspire our creation. The song was intended to encourage families to purchase their yearbook around holiday time as a present they’ll always remember. The song also featured the sneak peek of our 2018 cover, which we eventually released to the public 7 days later, over social media.
“All I Want For Christmas Is A Yearbook” was released on December 20th, 2016 and was a rendition of Mariah Carey’s “All I Want For Christmas Is A Yearbook.” The song attempted to show families how important the upcoming yearbook was going to be, and that holiday time was the perfect time to buy one. Also featured in the video was a sneak peek at our upcoming cover for ‘Same As It’s Never Been,’ which for the first time in BHS Reflections program history, we released a cover before distribution day.
My first promotional video came out on April 30th, 2015, just before the release of ‘You Don’t Know The Half of It’. The song was a parody of NSYNC’s classic hit, “Bye Bye Bye.” The song gave other staffers a chance to get involved in the promotional process and the chance to showcase what students and families were picking up, just a few days later.
Note: Before an upcoming football game with the theme, “Colorado Night” students at my school put together a DECA project, creating these shirts, and then selling them to students at the school and community members. When the group approached me to design an ad for them to advertise their shirts, I wasted no time putting it together. After taking the photos of the models in their shirts, I quickly put together a series of ads that could be used on social media so that the group could get the word out about the shirts. I used the CSU ‘Colorado Pride’ jerseys to inspire my creation in which helped the students sell shirts to over half of the school.
Buy your YearBOOk!
Note: For Halloween, I put together a promotional advertisement for social media to help push the sales of our upcoming yearbook. For the first time in our school history, we decided to move to an online only method of purchasing yearbooks, which created a dilemma. Usually, most students paid for the yearbooks at the beginning of the year at registration, but because we went fully online this year, we lost those early sales. To help try and make up for some of those lost sales, I designed this ad and posted it on our social media accounts to catch the student’s and parent’s eyes and sell more yearbooks. Super simple, but it did help sell some more yearbooks in the end.
Will Satler 