What Was This Project?
Our driving question for this project was “How does what we hear, read, and see influence us?”. In order to answer this big, looming question, we made an advertisement for a candy business in Deep Cove. We learned about how marketers target their audience, what techniques and appeals are, and other things that will be covered in this post. This project was a group project, but I am only really going to talk about the individual factor of it. I am also going to talk about the different stages of how we got to answering the driving question.
Launch
In the Launch phase, we did multiple things. The first thing we did was make and develop our need to knows. We had a chart that had three sections: Product, Process, and Content. These sections we would come back to many, many, many times with new questions and things that we had answered in the course of this project. On the chart, we put things that we needed to know for us to successfully create an ad for our business. The next thing we did was learn how to analyze text. To get better at analyzing and understanding text, we watched an ad created by Apple and they were selling their HomePod. We then analyzed it and wrote a paragraph about what we thought the message of the ad was and how they used it to get into the minds of their target audience.
Building Knowledge
In Building Knowledge we learned about different stuff that has to do with media. We learned about how people use different design principles in media and how to effectively use those principles. One of the cool things I think we learned about during Building Knowledge were the Five Key Media Literacy Questions. We learned about these things by looking at our group assigned advertisement and then we answered each of the five media literary. Here is the link to the commercial that we did. We also learned about what historical perspective is. Historical perspective is where you look at an ad, or a piece of media from history, and you think about what the audience of that time would have thought about it. We also looked at what we thought the advertisement meant today and then compared and looked at the differences between our points of view.
Develop and Critique
In Develop and Critique, we started actually putting together our advertisements for our businesses. The business that our group chose was Zücker, which is a candy shop in Deep Cove. This stage of the project was basically just creating drafts and getting feedback. For my first draft, I thought it was really good, but then after showing it to the teacher, I realized that it needed a lot of work before it was going to be ready to send to the business. So, for my second draft, I tried to do most of the critique that the teachers and my group told me to do. For my third, I think I did a pretty good job on it given the tools that I had, but my fourth draft is the best by far. I think that if I hadn’t done all the other drafts, my fourth one wouldn’t have been as good as it is if I hadn’t have gone through all the other drafts.
My drafts 1, 2, 3, and 4
Present
For this step of the project, we took our four drafts and shared them with our group. Everyone shared their final drafts and we all said what we liked, and what we thought could be worked on. Then we took a little bit of everyone’s draft (example, the background colour from one persons, the font from another’s, etc) and combined them into one that we sent to the business for feedback. I really enjoyed this part of the project because we got to show off our hard work to everyone. It was also cool to see what other people had designed with the same guidelines that I had.
Final Thoughts
I really enjoyed this project because I got to learn about a big thing that is in my life. I feel like I now understand way more about how advertising works and how they rope you into buying stuff that you usually don’t really need. During this project, we had to keep a chart of ads that we found daily and we did a review at the end of the week on one. I feel like that made it seem much more real that these techniques are being used on us daily because we got real life examples. It was fun seeing all of our work coming together in the end and making something that was really amazing.
Thank you for reading!! I will have more posts coming soon…
Best wishes,
-Dana