The Medium is The Message

This is another recap of a project called the medium is the message. This project was all about advertising. Our driving question was “how does what we read hear and see influence us”. This was the first big project for Humanities and we were all just getting into high school so most of our class was clueless and this brings us to our first Milestone.

Milestone one, this was the first milestone and to be honest I really did not know what to do. We watched an advertisement called “welcome home”. We then had to dissect this and show our understanding of the target audience and what message they used to reach their target audience. This was a fail (first attempt in learning), we say this because we just got into a new project and we were just getting to know the basics.

Milestone two, this milestone was surveying people that are not in your demographic. I chose to survey my mom. Like I thought we did not have the same perspective. We had different tastes in clothing and different perspectives in advertising. I learned that demographics can have impacts of what we think about advertising. I feel that most people have the same perspectives in advertising but different things could make the perspectives more broad.

Milestone three, this task was to make a chart and simply watch television. We were to record ads into this chart and show how they used either pathos which is a advertising strategy that uses emotional appeal, logos which uses logic, reason, statistics and facts and ethos which is when the advertiser makes you trust them. We also recorded some other strategies that the advertisers use. I saw that most of the time our classes advertisements we related to their particular channel. My channel was a sports channel so I got a lot of sponsors for the sports team advertising.

Milestone four, this milestone we wrote up an analysis for a book we read called “The Highest Tide”. We had to connect this to advertising like identifying literary techniques like pathos, logos and ethos. Another thing we had to find is some techniques that are different from pathos, logos and ethos.

Milestone five/six, these milestones were completed in Oregon. We made an ad for our local area business a couple weeks before this and this was for a business in Oregon. These milestones showed our shared understanding. We made many, many drafts and critiqued each other. We said things like you could add or have you tried doing this. Eventually we wrapped these up and that was the end of our first Humanities project of grade 8.

This was my first draft of my local business advertisement compared to the last.