The Media Is The Message

Driving Question and Big idea of the project

Welcome to another of my blogs. First, I’m going to be talking about the driving question and my answer to it. Now, you may be thinking: “What is the driving question?”. So here we go, the question is “How does what we hear, read, see influence us?” My answer is right there in my personal and group ad, and historical media.

The big idea of this project is that we should question ourselves about how what we read, hear, and see influence us. I think that as a PLP learner I have done great job questioning this.

Evidence of Learning

You may be thinking what is my answer to the driving question and that is coming up, however first I have to show you some evidence of my learning. The evidence I’m going to use is historical media analysis and my personal ad.

Let’s start with my historical media. I chose to do a ‘gun toy’ ad, which targets kids around the age of 10 years old. We can see this because there is a picture of a boy around that age holding his toy gun, as well as that almost the entire page is about the realistic gun sounds.

Historical ad

For this ad, I explained what techniques were used to attract my attention and more, which I will tell you about below. Now, let’s see who made the ad? The answer is, “Mattel, Inc”, toy makers in 1967. Well, what techniques were used to attract my attention? This is pretty simple, the huge colourful letters and the kid with his gun shooting at nothing would make me read anything, so this ad worked to get my attention. Some people might think it is a real gun because they didn’t read the smaller text at the bottom. I also think that this add encourages certain type of a lifestyle for kids to enjoy guns and own toys like guns. Now, it might be a stretch, but I think what if the government is strategically planning these ads to set kids up for war. Of course, the real reason for the message in this ad is that this toy company wanted to target small boys to make them want to buy gun toys, so that they can make money. Money is power and that’s all that matters to greedy people. The message for this ad is saying that this gun is so realistic even it sounds the exact same as a real gun.

Personal ad

Now that you’ve seen my first evidence I will show you my most important one. I am going to show you the evolution of my personal ad, which is my first ever ad.

This was the first draft of my personal ad. I’m not sure why I did this and what made me think this was a good ad, but thankfully, I restarted and it turned into this (below).

For this ad, I tried my best to be creative. I also used Canva to it’s best abilities, which made the ad exceptionally good. I used several elements such as a photo, text, and shapes to advertise Arms Reach bistro restaurant. To effectively advertise this I used a few design techniques and appeals like relationships, alignment, and space. By using fall colours like browns, yellows, and oranges I wanted to reflect a fall mood and to connect it to the text in the ad. I used the space design technique by using a single photo with minimal text to reduce cognitive overload for the people viewing the ad. Although, I did not take this picture, one of my teammates Owen (check out his post) did, I still think it is well laid out and eye catching. My ad is designed to appeal to younger people and make them interested in going specifically to this restaurant to have a cozy time with their friends.

Conclusion

In conclusion, I think between my historical media analysis and my personal ad, I did great following the driving question and answering it. But wait, I have not answered the driving question yet. Now, let me find the words to say it. Ah, I got it: “What we hear, read, and see affects us by making us to want something, and also, we may not even think that it’s making us want that specific something, may it be a picture of a donut on an ad or a Starbucks coffee in someone’s hand. It always has an impact on us! As well as that, some ads don’t work immediately to influence us, but our exposure to them over a longer period of time, maybe over months, like video game ads. Would you get a game from watching an annoying ad right away? No, but maybe after awhile you will. This is my answer to the driving question “What does what we hear, read and see influence us?”.