For the past 2 months, my class has been doing a project called The Media Is The Message. The project is about advertising and you guessed it Media we have done many little projects all made into one big project we call all the little projects milestones and all the little things that have to do with the milestones stepping stones. My class and I have done 6 milestones and this is my 7th so when I finish this I have done 7. In this post, I will talk and write about all the milestones and maybe a couple of steppingstones that led up to a milestone.

The teachers asked a question at the beginning of the project, how does what we hear, see, and read influence us? it was our driving question throughout this project and in every milestone/stepping stone we hade to answer that question. 

During the first couple of milestones that we did my class read a book called the highest tide by Jim Lynch this book was about a boy named miles who lived by the ocean and he would go out to find intertidal marine life to sell to aquariums. One night Miles herd something outside and found a giant squid. After finding a giant squid Miles got famous and learned a lot about the media like how they don’t care about real stories or what actually happened they just want an interesting story with big topics. This was a very interesting book it help me learn about the media as well as leaning about the ocean and the creatures that are in it. 

Milestone 1

In this milestone, I had to write a paragraph about an apple ad called welcome home. This was the first thing we did related to ads and we did not know any techniques that advertisers use or any tricks to draw people in so the paragraphs we wrote were not very descriptive or interesting. Later that month we learned about advertising techniques and appeals we looked back on our work and thought about the things we could have done better but did not change anything we just remembered that for other milestones or steppingstones we would do in the future. 

Milestone 2

In class, we learned a little more about types of advertising and how it has changed over time so our next task was to answer some survey questions then ask a person older than you to answer the same questions and see what differences there are. The questions were:

1. Do you collect any ads or advertising products? (e.g. Coca-Cola, Starbucks mugs)
2. Do you have any clothing with a visible designer name? (e.g. Old Navy) Give examples.
3. Do you have any clothing with a visible designer logo? (e.g. Nike) Give examples.
4. Have you ever bought any products based solely on advertising? Which and why?
5. Have you ever not bought products specifically based on advertising? Which and why?
6. List the places where you think you see advertising on a daily basis

I interviewed my mom and our answers were similar I guess because I was raised to see and believe the same things she does and maybe if I had interviewed my dad or one of my grandparents it could have turned out differently. 

The last thing we did for this milestone was at the top of the page we had to write a paragraph on the historical difference in advertising. 

Milestone 3

Milestone 3 was a small milestone we had to find 2 print ads 2 commercials and 2 web ads we had to write this down in a chart. One challenge included in this task was to find things of the category like apple ads or clothing ads after we got the ads we had to record the name of the product and say hoe the advertisement shows different persuasion techniques Also one last thing we had to do was put in a link to the ad. When I finished this milestone I had 2 ads from a magazine (my print ad) 2 ads from the tv (my commercials) and lastly 2 ads from the internet (my web ads) This was a very similar task to a stepping stone that we did a little bit before. In this stepping stone, we had to watch a certain channel on tv at a certain time for 30 mins to see what type of ads would be on tv at that time on that channel. We had to find 6 commercials I chose to watch sports net from 5:30 pm until 6:00 pm. That was helping us so that when we did this we could do it better. 

Milestone 4

In milestone 4 we had to write a paragraph on how the media influences the message. When we got to this milestone my class had just finished the book The Highest tide and milestone 4 had something get us to think about what we leaned about media during the book. As well as writing how the The Media Is The Message influences the message we also had to write how the media influenced Miles, how he grew as a person, and how it changed his perspective on the media. In this detailed paragraph, we had to include examples from the book to back up the paragraph. My class and I created a good topic sentence that would start us off on track then finish our selves.

Milestone 5-6

Milestone 5-6 were merged together into one big milestone, it had two parts but the same set of instructions with a couple of exceptions. The main idea of the milestones is to make an ad for a local business and make an ad for a business in Oregon which I have a post about. The first thing my group had to do was choose 5 possible local businesses that we would like to interview and make an ad for, my group had 3 other people in it Sophia, Jakub, and Cameron and in this, we would all have to interview the business together but make separate ads. The business we chose for our final ad was The Raven Pub, after we chose our business we had to email them to set up a date for the interview one problem was that we had to have it fairly soon because we were going to leave for Oregon in two weeks, we had to make the ad after the interview, and we had to make many different drafts before we left and got prepared for Oregon. This project helped us get more comfortable with interviewing people and getting us better at designing and amazing ad. We made many drafts and finally finished the milestone 5 part and got onto preparing for the milestone 6 part of the milestone. here is a picture of the final draft of my Deep Cove ad

The second half of this project we got our businesses my group’s business was the Hatfield Marine Visitor Center. We had a couple of classes to look at the business we would be interviewing on our Oregon trip. After we looked up our business and got as much info as possible we made the first draft, the first draft was terrible it did not have the feel of the company and I did not know much about the business so it had a lot of false information. The trip was 7 days long and my group interviewed the Hatfield Marine Visitor Center close to the end of the trip, when we got home it was the weekend so my group had 2 days to make another draft with more information and knowing the business better because we spent most of the day that we were there walking around the Center and looking around at there activities that they would want us to advertise. Here is a picture of the final draft of my Oregon ad

Lastly, there is a milestone 7. You just read my milestone 7 and I really hope you enjoyed reading about this project because I had so much fun writing it, looking back on all of my projects and seeing all the work that I put into those milestones and stepping stones.