Media Is The Message Reflection

Hello! For our first project in Humanities, we learned about advertising. There is a lot of things that people don’t realize that go into advertising, and we looked at all of the behind the scenes details, the hidden messages, the persuasive techniques, and more.

For our first step, we looked at a ad called Welcome Home. This ad was a apple ad, and it was advertising the HomePod. It’s a very cool ad, and I put the video in this post, so I suggest you check it out. We had to dissect the ad. What that meant was that we had to look at the ad from a bunch of different angles. We looked particularly at the demographic. This was a word that we ended up using a lot, so I can see why our teachers made us do this. I put my dissection in the post, so you can check it out if you want!

Welcome Home

Our next step was a Advertising Survey. We had to answer the following questions, and then have someone older than you answer them. Then we had to write a paragraph combining both of our answers, and relating those to historical perspective. Here are the questions that we had to answer.

Do you collect any ads or advertising products? (e.g. Coca-Cola, Starbucks mugs)

Do you have any clothing with a visible designer name? (e.g. Old Navy) Give examples.

Do you have any clothing with a visible designer logo? (e.g. Nike) Give examples.

Have you ever bought any products based solely on advertising? Which and why?

Have you ever not bought products specifically based on advertising? Which and why?

I have put in my completed survey below. This was one of my least favourite parts of the project. I found the writing style very difficult to do. I like writing interviews, and I like the interview writing style, but I don’t like how we had to turn the answers into a paragraph. I found that very challenging.

Advertising Survey

The next part of our project was our Deep Cove ads. We got assigned a group to make our ads with. As a group, we picked a business. My group chose a business called A’Hoy. A’Hoy is a store that sells clothing and lifestyle items from popular brands. It’s a very very cool place. We first set up a interview. We actually went and talked to a worker at the store. We asked them questions like:

How are you in competition with other companies?

Is there a certain thing that you want to advertise?

What do you sell the most of?

What techniques do you use to attract people to your store?

How do you currently advertise?

What demographic are you appealing to?

What are you looking for in an advertisement?

Once we had all of the information we needed, we got to work. We each made our own individual ads, but we helped each other as a group. We had our first drafts complete!

Our next part of the project was getting peer feedback and showing how we applied that to our ads. My feedback was:

After that, we made several more drafts. I changed my whole ad multiple times, which may of made my teachers very confused. I did eventually decide on one theme that I liked, and stuck with that. Once we had our final product, our Deep Cove ads were done!

Next, we had a very exciting step to do. We went to Oregon (you can read my blog post about it Here)!We went for many reasons, but one of them was for our Oregon Ads. We did almost the exact same thing that we did in Deep Cove, but in Oregon. This time, we got assigned a business. We worked with the same group. My group a very cool business called High Life Adventures. High Life is a zipline park in Warrenton, Oregon. We went ziplining as a class, and then my interview group did our interview. We asked some of the same questions from before, but a bit more tailored to High Life. We also did multiple drafts for our Oregon ad, but instead of getting peer feedback, we got feedback from our teachers. In front of the class. It was a little embarrassing, but luckily my ad didn’t get totally ripped to spreads.

Here is a progression of my work. I put in all of my drafts for the Oregon ad and the Deep Cove ad. Let me know which ad is your favourite!

 

The next part of this post is answering the driving question. The driving question is: How does what we hear, read, and see influence us?

This is a very complex question. The first thing that comes to mind is advertisements. Of course! If you see a ad that convinces you to buy something, it has influenced you. Another thing that I think of is stuff we read. Say that you read an article about Kit Kat’s. If the article gave valid, true examples as to why you should not eat Kit Kat’s, it would be hard for it not to influence you in some way.

That is how I think what we hear, read, and see influences us.

Bye for now!