Today I am writing about a unit that we just finished on advertising. There are a lot of techniques that people use in advertising that you don’t really see. We looked at all of theses different techniques and then created ads ourselves.

What we see, hear, and think can influence us; it can change every day to day lives. One of our first assignments was advertising techniques and appeals. For this our task was to find an add that went with a specific technique and appeal and share it to the class.

These were our advertising appeals. Each one had a definition explaining what it was. We found many ads that had these appeals in them and used these as our examples.

Emotional Security and Physical Well-being

The need to feel emotionally safe and secure.

Reassurance of Worth

The need to feel valued and respected.

Ego-gratification

The need to feel important and in control of your environment.

Creative Outlet

The need to feel capable of creating or skilful.

Sense of Power

The need to feel powerful and strong; the need to control and manipulate people and things.

Love Object

The need to love someone or something.

Sense of Roots 

The need to feel related to the past, or to friends and family.

Immortality

The need to feel capable of living forever.

In advertising people also use pathos, ethos or logos. Pathos is an emotional technique where they are trying to get you to feel some emotion from the ad. For example, love object or a sense of roots. Ethos is trying to put forward a strong argument to gain your trust and normally there is a celebrity promoting the product in the ad when ethos is used. The last one is logos. Logos is the one with logical answers and explanations and where they use numbers, statistics and logic to get your attention.

Every single ad either has logos, pathos or ethos. Maybe the ad might have two of the techniques but it’s quite rare that the ad will have all three. We also got to make an add. We went to Oregon on a class field study and it was amazing. While we were there we were all assigned a place that we would interview and create an add for. My group was given the restaurant ‘Chalet’. Chalet is a family owned restaurant where they do all day breakfasts. When we ate there I had hash browns, eggs and toast and their food was amazing!

This is the add that I made for the restaurant ‘Chalet’. Every time we made an add and handed it in our teachers would offer feedback so we could improve our adds and offer our best possible version. I made multiple drafts until I got my final one. These are my ads for Chalet.

I made many other drafts between these, but these are three which can show the process I went through to get my final version. I enjoyed the process, it was really fun and I learned a lot.