How does what we read, hear, and see influence us?
This is a great question that requires lots of understanding to answer. That’s why it was the “driving question” for our media/advertising unit named “The Media is the Message”.

This post is the “wrap up” for our project and it is also a reflection to look back on what we learned and apply that to something to show what we have learned.

We started this project with no expectations for what it was going to become. This was a huge surprise when it became something so impactful and important. In the first important activity we did was the dissection of an apple ad titled “welcome home” it is a very abstract and colourful ad. This all had a purpose though. The purpose of the flashy colours and abstract art style was all to create a memorable, fun, smooth ad. The big idea with these concepts was to make consumers remember the ad when in a store or when they are shopping in the electronics department as a whole. In this lesson we had learned that with big companies they wave the air reputation around to age abstract ads like these with “hidden” messages.

In the second important “milestone” as we call them, we performed a “survey”. This was a “survey” for two people. Yourself and a close family member or friend. This ad was supposed to show the impact of advertising on you or others, for example: one question on the survey was “have you recently bought anything solely on advertising?”. This question was there to show that whether or not advertising had a big enough impact on you for you to actually buy something just because it looked good in an ad.

This is the advertising survey. My answers are black and my mom’s are purple.

The third tsk we had to complete was the “persuasion chart”. It was a chart thats purpose was to have you explain what each print advertisement used in terms of techniques to get the reader hooked. This was an interesting project because you chose the ads yourself. This meant that you had to go find them all and perhaps use ones that had an impact on yourself.

This is the “persuasion chart” this was to show how ads persuade you.

The fourth step in this project was an analysis on a book called the highest tide. This was a book that we had been reading throughout his entire project so far. However this was the reflection that had to explain what effect media had on the main character of the book. This was to show our understanding of the message the book was trying to send to you about the effect of media.

This is the cover of The Highest Tide by Jim Lynch

The fifth and sixth task we had to complete were nearly identical. The difference was that one was after the other so that we could use our learning from the first to improve the second. The first of those 2 tasks was an advertisement for a local business. First we interviewed one of their employees for information on what sort of advertisement they were looking for. Next, we would create the advertisement by making drafts. We would get feedback from our classmates on what they all thought was good and what could we improvement. The second version of this assignment was to make an advertisement for a business in Oregon. The only difference between this and the local business were the fact that we got feedback from teachers not students this time.

This is the ad I made for High Life Adventures.