Category: Humanities

Hello Internet!!!!!!!

My name is Caden and in this post I will be telling you about my experience with the project Medium Is The Message. First of all we were told the driving question of this project, which was ‘How does what we see hear and view influence us? And I said “that’s a good question.” Thus we embarked on the journey that would be known in history as Medium Is The Message.

My group received a business to work with and partnered up to create something that at that moment in time was not yet revealed. We quickly discovered from what we were learning in our lessons that we would be making an ad for HONEYS DONUTS. At first I was unamused because most ads are boring to me and I just skip or ignore them but I would soon learn that making an ad is not what it seems. What I discovered was eye-opening.

I had no idea that making an ad was so difficult and involved so many different stages and drafts, which made a lot of great ideas fall by the wayside. Initially, we were building our knowledge, we did this by analyzing an ad by Apple about the Apple HomePod. From this I learned about target audiences and how I could attract different types of viewers. This would help me later on. Here is a link to the video. https://youtu.be/70P7-pkyP4Q

Later on in the project we analyzed historical media, this gave us a better understanding of two dimensional ads and how to make them eye-catching. From looking at these, we learned that we had to make the title POP and make the main feature the image so that people didn’t get bored by reading too much text. From my own personal experience I remembered that when an ad has a funny slogan or a pun in it I remember it more. I tried to include this in my work. This is the media I analyzed.

The final part of building knowledge that I’m going to speak about is our ad journal.  This is a selection of ads that we found in our every day life that we made into a journal to critique them and analyze key elements that we needed to include. From this I learned that I needed to make my message clear-  that honey‘s donuts are the best donuts you can buy- the business told us that!  We also needed to advertise that the donuts were very local. We added the location so people would know where to come if they wanted a delicious treat. Also we learned that we had to make the food look good and when I say good I mean really good these are known as persuasive techniques. This is my ad journal.

After gathering the information that we needed we were set the task to make our first ad. Now we all knew that this would not be our best ad and even if we thought it was amazing and could not be improved it would have to as it was only our first draft. This was my first attempt!

Terrible I know. I did not even have the exact address of honey‘s donuts and the ad is very plain. However, the logo is a good size and the picture of the donut I used the whole way through because I like it and I took it myself at the shop. We then went through the process of develop and critique, where our peers and our mentors helped us build and improve our ideas. This slideshows shows my progress

During this project I struggled with a few things. These were using my feedback effectively, continued motivation and coming up with ideas. However, I was really proud of both the photo I took at Honeys and used as my main image and the slogan I wrote using the word bee as a pun in “You’ll bee back soon”. I have learnt that in order to create a good ad you need perseverance and good ideas.

Now this project is coming to a close I can finally answer the driving question. How does what we see hear and view influence us as human beings? And the answer my friend is yours to explore, however this is my blog so I do what I want and my answer to this –  we are mostly influenced by what we see as we are engaged by bright colours, vivid images and funny slogans. We are surrounded by ads that influence us both consciously and subconsciously. They influence us in what we eat, what we buy and where we go.