How does advertising persuade, sell, and influence society? That might seem like a weird question, and it is if you don’t know what to look at. This was our driving question for our final project of PLP 8 on advertising. It even took us down to Oregon to interview businesses.

Stage #1

For the first part of this project we learnt about what ads are, how they work, what makes them good, and other information about them. The big takeaways were techniques and appeals in advertising. I hoped we would look into how a big company makes that ad and give some examples of ads that weren’t for products or ideas. We mainly focused on the final product, but it worked out, and I learnt all about what makes an ad.

Stage #2

In this stage we went to Oregon. I have a post all about Oregon if you want to learn more about what we did there. The reason we went there was to learn about our businesses we would be making an ad for. The place I promoted was Yaquina Head. The biggest difficulty with Yaquina is they aren’t selling a physical product so you have to sell an idea and set of feelings. Getting all that into a print ad isn’t the easiest but I found a way to do it.

Stage #3

In the last building stage I made many different iterations of my ad, with each one being better then the last. In the end I had something like 8 draft and each having smaller changes in them. I also made 2 other drafts that went in a different direction focusing on the tide pools, and not the lighthouse.

Stage #4

Presenting my work to the world is the final step of almost all PLP projects if not all. Instead of just a blog post, we also shared our work at the Spring Exhibition. Unlike the Winter Exhibition it doesn’t have a theme, just different projects each grade worked on. Our project was the ads of course, and we had our whole advertising group presenting our ads together.

 

This might have been my favourite Humanities project yet this year. Advertising has always interested me, and being able to work on an ad that has some of the same steps as a real agency would go though was pretty cool to do in a school project.