Howdy! It’s November, I can’t believe it! About a week and a bit ago we got back from our Oregon field school. So, now I’m here to talk about what we did. First things first, we went to Oregon to get some real life experience on advertising (and other things) But before that, there were a lot of steps leading up to Oregon. It all started with us doing this project called “The Medium Is The Message”. It’s a project where we had to find out a lot about advertising and sharing thoughts and ideas. Here is one of the first and pretty important things I learned. It’s not important to the project, but it’s important to how I understood the project. Here it is: The word “medium” is the singular version of media. This blew my mind. I had no clue of this fact. Anyways, now we are done the project and the last step we have to do is our reflection.  Here are, in my opinion, some of the most important steps in this project.

MILESTONE 1: Welcome home dissection.

For milestone 1 we had to watch and then dissect an ad. The ad be watched was called “welcome home” and is advertising the Apple HomePod. Click here to watch it.  The dissection didn’t have to be long, just a paragraph. The skills we were being assessed for were: Text Comprehension and Appreciation Strategies. This means that we had to explain what the ad was trying to say and then how it was saying it.  I didn’t do very well on this milestone, but thankfully there were lots of other opportunities to show my work on this skill. This step was showing us how to understand text and trying to teach us how to see that everything we see makes us think about something. 

Here is my analysis of the welcome home ad. I was able to think about the different colours they used and why and the different ways they showed emotion.

 

 

 

MILESTONE 2: An Advertising Survey. 

In milestone 2 we were given some questions we had to answer. These questions were about advertising on everyday products. An example of 1 of the questions is “Have you ever bought any products based solely on advertising? Which and why?” After we were done answering the questions, we then had to ask them to an older demographic than us, and see how their answers differ from ours. I asked my Grandpa because he is not just 1 generation but 2 generations older than me. I recorded his answers but I am not going to include the questions in this post. They were not the most important part. The most important part of this assignment was the paragraph we wrote, describing the relation between my answers to the questions and my grandpa’s.Competency Being Assessed: Historical Perspectives.  This means we had to explain “different perspectives on past or present people, places, issues, or events, and compare the values, worldviews, and beliefs of human cultures and societies in different times and places.” The thing this part of the project is trying to teach us is that people who are older than us may see something differently, and that each ad is trying to appear differently or better to a certain demographic or, target audience

Here is my paragraph: 

The paragraph: “For the first questions it asks if we collect any advertising products. My grandpa said that he did not come into contact with these things where as I do come into contact with them, just I just don’t buy them. I think this shows that with an older demographic such as my grandpa, he doesn’t believe in these things, he never started, so he never has to stop. But I come into contact with these things, and I don’t strongly disagree like he does, I’m just not interested. I think this all means that he was raised in a time where you could do things with out ads popping up constantly. So now when they are everywhere, he just ignores them.

Grandpa believes that if you like something, you should buy it. Not because the advertisement for the product was the most creative. I believe that the better the ad, the more effort they put into it, so the more effort they are going to put into the product. Our world views are pretty different, because he focuses on the product and I focus on how the product was made.“

Milestone 4: the Highest Tide analysis

For this Milestone we took the long process of reading the book The Highest Tide By Jim Lynch. In the book, the main character Miles finds a giant squid and then suddenly the news people are really interested in him. Miles is a little wary at first but then warms up to them. In the end he realizes that what he is thinking is more important to himself and the people who care about him, he doesn’t need to share everything with the press. We had to read the book and then analyze it.

Competency Being Assessed: Literary Identification and Analysis. This means that we had to use literary devices and analyze the text throughly. I think this step in the project is to teach us about how news people act, and how to understand why people do what they do when trying to collect stories. Here is my analysis:

In the Highest Tide by Jim Lynch, did the conflicts with the media lead to the start of when Miles started to learn about his emotions? During the book, Miles went through a lot of conflict, What with his mom moving out, the media’s sudden interest in him and Florence’s death, but when does Miles start to appreciate and learn about his emotions? In the start of the book Miles doesn’t really think about anything of real importance to his emotions, mostly just about sea life. For example, he states that he can’t read a Rachel Carson book and then fall asleep, so he is thinking more about that than anything going on in his family. In the second part of the book, the setting really changes; like when he visits the cult, and he starts to think about what people think of him. When Miles is at the cult’s place, he at first doesn’t want to talk about sea life, but then can’t stop talking even when he realizes that there is a news reporter there. Near the end of the book when Florence dies, Miles realizes that he can’t let the news people see that he is upset, he has to pretend everything is fine. Jim Lynch uses words to describe things like grey, somber and souls howling to portray the fact that all is not right with the world. In the end, I think that Miles learned that you have to be carful with what you say and act around the media because everything is connected to the media, and that his emotions are his alone to feel, not share with the world.

(Just a little side note here, there are three types of persuasive techniques. Pathos, Ethos and Logos. Pathos appeals to you emotionally. Ethos appeals to your sense of credibility in the product. And Logos appeals to your sense of logic, like if something makes sense. We will come back to this later, I’m just warning you, it has something to do with different types of people. 

Milestone 5 and 6: Awesome Ads

For this step 5 we had to make ads for a business in  Deep Cove and then for a business in Oregon. My business in deep cove was deep cove kayaks I think my ads started out ok and then really progressed throughout the different revisions. We had to do A LOT of revisions for these ads. First we had to interview the business and then we could get to work on our ads. Here is a slide show of my deep cove ads:

My first draft could have been a lot better. I just used a photo I didn’t take and I didn’t take and my colours didn’t really follow the colours of Deep Cove Kayaks.

My second draft wasn’t terrible but there was still way too much writing.

My third draft was a big improvement but I still didn’t use white space correctly

My final draft I am actually pretty proud of. I used the right amount of writing to pictures, I used the space correctly and I used the right colours. I am really happy with the evolution and how this latest one turned out!

I think the point in the ads step in this project was to learn how to create ads. I think this is what the whole project was leading up to and now it’s our chance to use all we learned! The driving question for this project was: how does what we hear, read, and see influence us. I think this is the part where we could put all that we learned in the past milestones and stepping stones into our ads. I think that different styles of ads, even really sneaky ones, influence us in different ways. Throughout this project I developed a theory that there are 3 different types of people. 1) the people who are more moved by funny things. 2) the type that if the ad is emotional it really sticks with them and they are constantly thinking about it. 3) the type that really likes it if there is something in the ad that is really smart and really sticks with them, they are thinking about how it works all day. I am the third type of person. These three things also line up with pathos, ethos and logos. I think advertisement developers have this theory too and they make ads that line up with these 3 types of people and/or a different demographic.

 

Now on to the Oregon ads. I think these are also really good and I am REALLY PROUD (with lots of emphasis) of my Oregon ads. Our business is Clark’s. We really did a good job on the interview and I think that my ads have really improved since the start of this projet.

I think my first draft was ok, but I didn’t have any photos yet and it was a bit wordy.

My draft 2 was definitely and improvement but it was still a bit wordy and it didn’t really make sense

My draft three was a big improvement but it still didn’t look right. I think the photos didn’t blend together very well in a seamless ad. Some of the feedback I got was that I needed to make it look like someone other than me made it.

My final draft was BEAUTIFUL I am very impressed with myself for making something beautiful like this.

In conclusion, I think my ads need to include more pictures and less words, but overall I really got better at advertisement making.

cheers,

Kate