Media Is The Message

For the past month my grade 8 humanities class has been focusing on the medium vs the message. This project felt like it was never going to end but thankfully it did not too long ago. As you know we went to Oregon for a field study and learnt more about how the medium and the message influences us. For starters, you may not know what medium means, and no it’s not the size. I can’t blame you for not knowing because quite frankly, I didn’t either. The word medium is the singular version of media and when I found this out I knew I had a lot of learning to do. Anyways, enough with that, the whole point of this project was to understand and explain how what we see, hear and read influences us. We completed six milestones and a number of stepping stones along the way, these helped me build my knowledge that will now help me in the long run.  

The milestone to kick us off was called, The Welcome Home Dissection. Even though this was a very little assignment it probably helped me the most. You may be thinking, what is “welcome home”, it is a four minute long Apple advertisement released in 2018 showing of the new HomePod. For this task we had to break down what was going on in the ad and how they are using their message to influence the viewer. This was our first assignment so I didn’t really know what I was doing and how I was going to apply the criteria to my paragraph. I struggled at times and didn’t know what to do but I managed to persevere and finish. A few days later I received a grade and lets just say, it wasn’t great. Even though I didn’t get the mark I wanted to I knew there were going to be more times where I can show this skill. 

The second milestone was probably the one I hated the most. We were asked to complete a survey that had the following questions.

Do you collect any ads or advertising products?

Do you have any clothing with a visible designer logo?

Have you ever bought any products based solely on their advertising?

Have you ever not bought any products based solely on their advertising?

After we answered the questions for ourselves we needed to ask somebody in an older demographic the exact same questions. Once both surveys we completed, we had one task left. This was the hardest part. We needed to write a paragraph that explains how the two sets of answers demonstrate a difference in historical perspective. After doing that milestone two was complete, and I was much happier than I needed to be. I don’t know what it was about this that made me hate it but I wasn’t going to give up right away so I kept a growth mindset and somehow finished it and got a decent mark. I think I could have done a better job on this if I surveyed somebody two generations ahead of me instead of one because the differences weren’t big enough. 

Milestone three was next and it didn’t help me at all. Actually that is a lie, it helped me be grumpy in the morning because I was up until 12:30 am working on it. This milestone was about completing a chart about ads using Pathos, Logos and Ethos, but we don’t need to get deeper into my chart but we can talk and explain what Pathos, Logos and Ethos is. Basically, Pathos, Logos and Ethos are techniques used in all sorts of advertising. What I think is the most common technique used is pathos, pathos is an appeal to you emotionally, some ways that pathos is used are by mentioning kids, most people when the see kids in advertising think it is cute and generally want to buy the product more. Ethos is an appeal to credibility and logos appeals to your sense of logic. 

Milestone four was a big one. We needed to reflect on the book we had been reading for the last three weeks, and that was… The Highest Tide by Jim Lynch. Personally, I’m not much of a reader and I really learnt that during this project. I was reading each weeks section on the last day and it was not a smart idea. I kept on putting it off until Wednesday night quickly appeared. Once I finally managed to finish the book, yep, you guessed it, I needed to write a paragraph. This time we knew more about advertising so it was a little easier but the expectations were higher. The point of the paragraph was to show how we can understand how the media was effecting Miles’ life and how we can relate it do ourselves. Once that was out of the way I felt good about myself and I knew if was growing. 

We have now read all of the information we needed to create our final project, making our own advertisement. We were assigned groups of four, my group consisted of Amy, Nate, and Keenan. From there we had to choose a local Deep Cove business to interview and create an ad for. After a lot of contemplating we decided A’Hoy was going to be our best bet. After a lot of research on the company, we needed to set up a time that we could interview the manager. We worked interdependently to come up with questions that would help us make our ads better and get more knowledge. Some of the questions we asked were,

How do you currently advertise?

What do you look for in an advertisement?

What product would you want to be advertised?

What is your best seller?

What demographic do you appeal to?

Is there a certain theme you stick to?

After our long discussion we took all of our information and created an advertisement. I had never made an ad before so I was lost, I didn’t know what to do or what I was doing wrong, all I knew was it what I created was really ugly. I knew I needed to revise it so that is what I did. After 20 minutes of fixing I got to something that I thought kind of worked. We did some peer critique and it really helped me. I received one piece of positive feedback, one piece of negative feedback, and one piece of unusual feedback.

“I really like the photo and how you put an address and a link”

“Maybe move the “A’Hoy” over to the left a bit because you can’t fully se the “y”. I really like the colour though”

“What exactly do they sell”

I took my peers advice and edited my ad, I made many more revisions and changes until I got to the final product. Here are my Deep Cove ads.

Now we had some practice, we headed down to Oregon and did the same thing. This time we didn’t get to choose our business but I got lucky and got High Life Adventures. This is a really cool zip-line park with a unique line that goes over a lake. After having lots of fun, we needed to interview them. We asked very similar questions to last time, but they were now a bit more direct to High Life Adventures. Once again we made multiple drafts and instead of peer review, we did teacher review. My ad got very harsh but helpful feedback, it was exactly what I needed. I made very many revisions but they were all little changes. Here are my Oregon ads.

Let’s go back to the driving question I mentioned at the beginning. How does what we hear, read and see influence us. It is now time to answer that. This question isn’t very easy to answer but I guess that’s the whole point. When you hear this question the first thing you think about is advertising. You are right about that, if you see a very convincing ad you will think about buying it and there you go, you have been influenced by an ad. It’s not just ads though, you can also read things like people opinions on something and that might help you decide on buying a certain product. All of these things will help you make a conclusion on something, but you can also just go with your own opinion and that is totally fine. 

Now that we have finished our advertising unit, we move on. This project has taught me a lot about the outside world and even myself, it has been a journey that I am glad a took.