An advertising project.

In this summative post, I will be looking back and reflecting on my growth as a learner throughout our first humanities project. This project was all about advertising and questioning how what we read, hear and see influences us. By following the steps of the project path, we can now answer the driving question for this project. We analyzed adds, historical perspective, media definitions and even created our own ads to help us be able to answer the driving question. Now it’s time to reflect!

Without further ado, let’s explore what this project was about and how it all started.

The driving question for this project was “ How does what we read, hear and see, influence us?” We were supposed to keep that question in mind throughout the project, to be able to answer it at the end of the project. The first step in the project path was “the LAUNCH 🚀”. This is the step where we learnt about our task and developed out Need To Know ( NTK ) questions. In this project we were going to be working with real life businesses and advertisement specialists to create a final group add, that we’d be presenting to our business. After learning a bit about the general concept of this project, we received the name of the business we’d be working with. My group was composed of Sydney, Evangeline, Daniel, Owen and Magnus. The business we received was The Local Lift juice bar.

Building knowledge :

The first step in building knowledge was to research and gather information about our business online. With our gathered information, we created a script for our initial contact phone call to our business owner, Jacqueline. She is a very busy person, so it took more time then other groups to find a date for our interview that worked for her and for my group.

When we finally figured out a date that worked, we made a quick interview call in the library where each group member asked Jackeline one of our seven written questions. I felt very accomplished after finishing our interview, because we were interviewing a real business owner. I thought this step was hard, because we couldn’t find a time that worked. If our group had to improve one thing in the interview, I think we would have to try to not make any background noise when someone’s is asking their question.

Checkpoint:

I thought I’d show you one of our first assignments. For this assignment, we watched an add for the Apple HomePod. I thought this add was super unique and fun. The bright colours and moving music appeals to younger people. Our assignment was to write a paragraph that explains how I understood the message of the ad and who I think is the target audience for this add. We watched the video in class and talked about it in our class table groups, so I had a handful of ideas to work with. Check out my paragraph below.

We did a similar assignment for 💎 milestone 1. Instead of using a recent add, we analyzed a historical piece of media and used historical perspective. This is the piece of media I decided to analyze:

I found this add very surprising because nowadays you wouldn’t see a baby being suffocated in a plastic bag in an add. CaTo be able to analyze this add, we had to put on our historical shoes to predict what these ads meant to the people who lived in the past.

Create

The next milestone was to create the first draft of your individual add. Keep in mind that the business I was working for wanted to display that they were doing renovations and wanted to encourage locals to come check out their store. I created my design on an app called Canva.

Those were my series of advertisement drafts. Each one got some peer critique, teacher critique or sometimes I’d ask my parents their opinion. The I’d try to make some adjustments until it fit the improvements I needed to make. My final individual add got approved by one of the PLP Humanities teachers. Overall, I’m really pleased with my final individual add draft.

Once all my team mates had approved individual adds, it was time to combine our ideas to make an even better group add. I got to admit, this was one of the trickiest parts of this project. When we zoomed with Mr. Hepburn, a creative director, he gave us some pro tips on how to make your add great. He also stated that one thing you do not wanted to avoid when making an advertisement, was clogged advertising. You don’t need to say every single thing in your add. Nobody likes to read tiny fonts on ads. His tip was to Keep It Simple Stupid ( K.I.S.S.). 

Especially when making a group add, you have to pick the ideas that work well together, tell a story, and still fit you clients needs. After all, it’s the client’s add, not your add.

Our first group add was not great. Personally, I didn’t find that it told a story or was that catchy. It was hard to pick and choose ideas and to make our add organized. Luckily, next class, each group got to zoom with Mr. Hepburn, to receive his criticism and critique on our group add. He had some really important things to say. He showed us copies of our adds that he had edited for our add examples. Mr. Hepburn said that our add had a good base but he wanted “ The Local Lift” to be at the bottom in case people don’t know what that is. You want to reel them in by having them read your catchy slogan first. He also recommended that we play up on the renevation by adding tool icons like a hammer, a saw, a screwdriver or a wrench. After hearing what Mr. Hepburn had to say, my team made a lot of changes to our add. It improved so much as we applied his feedback.

Here is our final add that we sent to our business:

So how does what we read, hear and see influence us ?

There are ads everywhere. You see them on bus stops, on billboards, in flyers, in the newspaper, on the radio, on the internet, on Instagram, on TV, on YouTube. Some people don’t even realize, but these ads influence us in some way or another. Ads make us want to buy a product by using emotional appeals, facts, experts and or tricking the brain into thinking we need a product to make us happy, popular and cool. They influence our everyday choices, and perspectives on things like brands, products and businesses. Take clothing for example. When a friend, classmate, coach, teacher or someone you know have a piece clothing that you like, these people are marketing that product. Eventually, you’ll be influenced into getting that jacket, hat, hoodie etc. The same thing happens for a service, like a real estate agent. If everything goes well , the previous customers might recommend you to this particular real estate agent. The consumer becomes the marketer. We must be conscious that we are part of some target audiences, that not all products will make us happy like displayed in the ads and that we are influenced by ads and others, in both positive and negative ways.

Conclusion

To start the year off, this was a super fun first project. I got to work on my collaborative skills by communicating with adults, a business owner, my teachers and my team mates. My favourite part of this project, was creating ads, and making improvements on each draft to meet the clients needs.

Thank you Sydney, Evangeline, Daniel, Magnus and Owen for beeing good team mates and helping to create our final add!

Thanks for reading this blog post.