My grade eight class just finished a project called Medium is the Message. This project was all about the media and how it influences people in their choices and their lifestyle. We looked at advertising and the techniques they use in the ads to catch peoples eye or persuade them to thinking something different. We looked at all different types of advertising and then tried making our own advertisements. We created print advertisements for a local business. During the project we had a question that was meant to help us with our work when we were stuck or didn’t know quite what to write, we were supposed to be able to answer the question by the end of the project. We called it our driving question, it was,

“How does what we hear, read, and see influence us?”

This past summer we were asked to read a book called “The Highest Tide, By Jim Lynch”, this book is about a thirteen year-old boy named Miles who loves marine biology. He goes out everyday to the tidal flats near his house and looks for intertidal animals, that he collects and sometimes sells to the aquarium. One day he goes out at night, and hears a weird noise, he walks over to it and finds a giant squid. That night changed his entire summer. After that people kept coming to interview him, the media kept coming to talk to him. At first he liked it but then he starts to realize the media doesn’t want to know the real story they just want a story that will be popular and catch the readers attention. This was our first introduction into how the media works. I thought this was a great way to start learning about the media because I love reading and am able to understand the text well. It also is a simple way to start our learning and comprehension of text.

Our first assignment in the project was dissecting an advertisement. We were to watch the commercial “Welcome Home” and write what they were doing to reach their target audience. This introduced what a target audience was, and the point of it. It help me understand that there is always a target with an advertisement, they’re not just images and videos. Everything that is put in there has a purpose to help sell the product. This part of the project was actually a big learning part for me. At the time I didn’t realize it but after finishing the project I see that it has really showed me a good example of an ad the affects people.

After we learned about advertising we looked into how other people viewed it, and if there was difference how people viewed advertising between different ages. I asked my Mom about advertising to see if we had different views on it. We actually had very similar views, which is kinda uncommon because these days advertising is becoming a more normal thing, with the internet and social media. When my mom was a kid advertising was less common so she doesn’t like how there are ads everywhere now. Most kids my age are used to advertising and think its fine, but when I was growing up my parents always told me that advertising was bad and that they tried to trick you into liking a product. So me and my moms views on advertising are very similar because she always told me what she thought about advertising. The fact that advertising has become more normal has change the way people consume products. There are more people buying and collecting items forms stores. Here are the questions that me and my mom answered,

Advertising Survey

Our next step in learning was knowing the different techniques and appeals, and how to use Pathos, Ethos, and Logos. All of this was very new to me, I knew there were different techniques but I didn’t know the specifics. Trying to memorize all of the techniques and appeals was hard. There are so many and some are very similar to each other. To help learn them we would look at different ads as a class and point out the different techniques they used. Then we would go and find our own ads and write about how they appeal to the customer. We would explain the different uses of Pathos , Ethos and Logos. This was a really big part of our learning process, because we were seeing the different ways ads can be presented. We worked on this stage for a while until everyone fully understood. This step was really helpful in answering the driving question. It showed us the different ways advertisements affect us and how they do that.

Now that we had a pretty good understanding of advertising, we were asked to analyze the Highest Tide. We had to write a paragraph on how advertising affected Miles, the main character in Highest Tide. The point of this was to show that we understood what we had read and show that we had learned how advertising can effect people.

The final step after learning everything, was to create our own ad. We were put into groups of four, and in that group we picked a local business that we were interested in advertising. We then had to get in contact with them and set up an interview. This part was hard for my group because our first choice was to busy to meet, so we were getting behind. Once we finally got an interview with another business we started to make our first drafts on the advertisement. My group didn’t get to make as many drafts as other groups because of the loss of time.In the ads we were making we had to show that we know how to use different techniques to appeal to the target audience. These are two ads I made,

   

First draft                                        Second draft

This was to prepare for creating an advertisement for an Oregon business, where we were traveling near the end of the project. When we were in Oregon our group was given a business that we had to advertise. Our business was Nisa’s Thai, a small thai restaurant in Oregon. We had to have an interview with the owner of the business and ask them about the restaurant. Our interview went pretty well, it was sometimes a little awkward when the owner wouldn’t know how to answer are questions. When this happened we would try and phrase the question differently, this worked and we would get our answer. When we were done the interview we started to make our first drafts of an advertisement. When making the advertisement we had to make sure we used an image we took when we were there, we had to have info about the business, we had to use proper white space, and fonts that go well together. These are all things we learned about in the project. We had to apply all our learning into creating our ad. Here are some of the drafts I created,

 

Making our ads was the last step in our learning. It was showing that we could apply what we had learned in order to create something really cool. We were put in the shoes of the advertisers, we had to create an ad that would influence peoples ideas and thoughts to make them want to go to the business we were advertising. It was our final step in understanding the driving question, “How does what we hear, read, and see influence us.” It flipped the scenario for us, we were the ones trying to influence. I think that is a great way to end the project because it makes us think just a little harder on what we had learned.

This project was really fun and I learned a lot. Everyday there was something new we were going to learn. We always had a new concept to add or to try and figure out. This project taught me that there is a point to advertising. There is structure and a target to who they advertise to. People in the advertising business always want to catch the viewers eye and present an image of the business that is appealing and seems interesting. When they do this it affects the viewer, by making there mind think that their product is the best or that this company has better things to offer. This project showed me that advertising is more complicated than it seems.

Either write something worth reading, or do something worth writing

-Benjamin Franklin