The Medium is the Message reflection
This term we:
•Did lots of group work and learned how to blog
•Looked at ads from a historical and target audience perspective,
•Analyzed design techniques, persuasion techniques and categories
•Read a book and some extra texts (like McLuhan)
•Designed an ad for a customer
Before we started learning about advertising, I wasn’t really interested in ads. The only ads that caught my attention were about food or tv shows. I liked retro ads like “where’s the beef” and ads that are funny, like the ad for insurance for women: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIphoZxFJ0k.
In the Medium is the Message, we didn’t only focus on advertising, we also learned how to deliver a message. I set up my first blog, and worked with a few groups. This taught me how to discuss, listen and learn from other people, and give them ideas and take their critiques of my work. I also learned how to blog – I found it really tough at the start, but it is getting easier. I was proud of my blog that included posts to music. I had never done that before and it was fun: http://www.blog44.ca/bent/sample-page/
One of the things I enjoyed was looking at ads from a historical perspective. I like old retro ads about airplanes, so was able to find some interesting ones, analyze who they were targeted to, and how well they might have worked, and also thought about my own response to those ads today. My favourite ad I found was the TWA one. It features my favourite airplane. (Picture of ad) I also got to interview my dad about his perspective on advertising, and learned that we basically think almost the same thing about ads – we like to do more research less than relying on advertising claims. 
We didn’t just look at ads and talk about them, we also learned how to analyze them and even make them. We learned some design stuff – layout, colour and how to get people’s interest in the ad. Persuasion techniques were one of the things we looked at in our weekly ad chart – one of the best I found was an ad for a taxi company that made taking a taxi look adventurous. When I first did an assignment to watch TV ads and talk about the persuasion techniques, I didn’t enjoy it, but when I did the ad chart, I started to find it easy to put ads into categories like “water is wet” and the “we’re different and unique” claim.
The Gospel According to Larry was cool. It was a book about a character named Josh that used an identity called Larry to motivate people for anti-consumerism. The book wasn’t really my favourite because you didn’t really get to meet the characters and it had no plot to it. I did work hard on understanding the text by doing the worksheets. I didn’t really like the McLuhan text either. I still like reading though, just not this stuff.
The biggest project was designing an ad for Ahoy. My blog about that is here http://www.blog44.ca/bent/2020/11/08/advertising-draft-reflection/. I’m proud of the work I did in designing and refining my ad.
Those were some of the projects we did in the Medium is the Message. That is all.