Last semester, we went through a lot of time effort to make the Winter Exhibition happen, and it was very chaotic but still fun. So of course we had to do it all again this semester with the Spring Exhibition! Our driving question for this exhibition was “How does advertising persuade, sell, and influence society?” To answer this question, we had to make advertisements of our very own. Since we wanted to make proper advertisements for actual businesses, we were put into groups and assigned a business to research, interview, and make an advertisement for. To do this, our Grade 8 PLP class went on a week long trip to Oregon, which I talk about in my last blog post. My group’s business was a Chinese restaurant in Oregon called Kam Meng. Here is my process to making my ad!

LAUNCH

To start my process, we used the LAUNCH cycle which is Look listen and learn, Ask tons of questions, Understand, Navigate, Create prototypes, and Highlight and fix. For Look listen and learn, we had to research online about our business so that when we went to Oregon to interview them, we looked professional, and had actual questioned based on their business that we needed to be answered. The next step was Ask tons of questions. For this, we asked tons of questions! We wrote down our interview scripts, introducing our group, deciding what questions to ask, and writing a thank you script for the end of the interview. After this was the Understand part of LAUNCH. To understand our business we needed to dig deep, but also make some educated guesses. We needed to find out more about our client, who their competition might be, what makes them different from their competitors, and who their target audience (the group of people that their product or service is pointed at) was. When that was all done, we got to go to Oregon to interview one of the staff members at Kam Meng. When we had recorded all of the information that they gave us, it was time for the Navigating part of LAUNCH. To do this, we planned out the design principles of our ads, and made mood boards of what kind of mood we wanted our ad to have. Then is was time to actually start making the ads. Personally in my opinion, Create a prototype was the hardest part of this whole process. In this step we had to make draft, after draft, after draft of the same advertisement over and over again. There was always something to be fixed, or something to adjust to make it better. After that was over, it was time for the last step of the LAUNCH cycle, Highlight and Fix. So after I had finally gotten a product that I was satisfied with, I went through all my other drafts and highlighted what I like about some of them, and what I had to fix for some others. When the LAUNCH cycle was at it’s end, then we presented to the world through our Spring Exhibition. My final product as well as my LAUNCH portfolio can be seen below.

Strengths

What were some of my strengths in this exhibition? Well something that I think me and my group did really well in this exhibition was the preparation of our stand. Since we had a smaller group that was all in the same grade this time, it was so much more easier to communicate with them. We had classes together when we could work on things and talk things out, as well as group chats to figure out who was bringing what, who was in charge of what, and whether or not we had everything that we needed. 

Weaknesses

Something that I personally think that we could have done better was the clean up. After the exhibition had ended and all the guests left, some people just left or hid in the bathroom while other people did most of the cleaning. People were goofing off, or off task when we needed to be cleaning, but in the end everyone got their act together and we were able to all go home at a decent time. Next time I think that we would be able to go home even earlier if everyone stayed on task the whole time.

Conclusion

Overall, I think that this exhibition went way smoother and less chaotic than last time, and the whole process was a little bit easier, since we had done this before, even though working with the LAUNCH cycle was a totally new thing for me. I think that the next time we use the LAUNCH cycle again, it will go even smoother than this time, because I now understand what I’m doing. I look forward to the many exhibitions to come in the future, and I hope that I will learn from my mistakes and turn them into my strengths, so that the exhibitions in the future will be even better than the ones that I’ve already done. Thank you for reading this blog post, and I hope to see you at my next one!