My final ad

The driving question for this project was, “How does what we hear, read and see influence us?” This project was focussed on advertising and advertising is one of the biggest things that can influence us, so that’s how I think the driving question relates to the project quite well.

For this project we were put into groups and we had to make an ad for a local business. My business was actually a local realtor called Patricia Houlihan. I know Patricia and have seen her adverts before.

The big idea for this project was to make an ad for a local company, to learn about advertising, and to learn about how to communicate, how to work in a team, learn new skills, and to actually produce a decent advert!

These were all of the drafts for my ad that I made for Patricia Houlihan. They started out quite rough and slowly got better throughout this project, but me and my team ended up creating and finishing a final ad that we gave to Patricia Houlihan. Even if the outcome maybe didn’t come out perfect I learnt a lot from this project and through making advertisements.

Some of my strengths through the project were being able to visualize how I wanted my ad to look. I think I was a strong team member because I contributed the idea for the ad and helped to create a lot of it in the apps. The biggest stretch for me in the project was that it was quite hard to make an ad for a person rather than a product. Another stretch was also having to include a lot of details, but also having to try and keep it simple and make sure it looked good.

My historical media analysis

Another part of this project that I thought was really interesting was the historical media analysis. We had to analyze older ads and think about why they were made, who the target audience was, as well as what techniques were used to attract peoples attention. It was one of the first things we did to learn about advertisements and understand them at a deeper level.

After thinking about this driving question for a while, I realised what a big question it really is. It made me realize how much of what we read, see and hear is designed to influence us. It might not just be about buying things, it might also be about how we think and what our opinions are.  And from making my own ad, it’s made me realize how much work actually goes into changing what other people think and feel.

Since I started this project, I’ve realised that most things I’ve seen, or heard, or read on TikTok, to YouTube, to the newspaper (which we actually still get) is trying to influence us somehow.