Imagine yourself lying on the warm sandy shore of a beautiful beach in Oregon. Your toes running through the soft sand, the salty air brushing through your hair, the soothing sound of waves crashing gently against the shore. 

You want to Oregon now, don’t you? Isn’t it crazy how just and sequence of words strung together can make you dream of going somewhere or doing something? This Is called advertising. I have spent the last 2 months learning about, working on, and creating advertisements.

The Project

This project was full of a lot of learning and assignments that all lead up to creating a advertisement campaign for Oregon to display at the spring exhibition, all while trying to answer the driving question, how does language inspire adventure?

To create the campaign we worked in groups of 5 where we were given the theme connection with nature. We then had to find a font, a colour scheme, we had to create a logo,  we had to each create our own individual ads, we had to create a video ad, and we had to put our logo on merchandise.

I created the video advertisement for the group and it is something I am very proud of. It was an original idea, and I believe I was very creative and successful in making people want to go to Oregon and connect with nature.

My Answer to the Driving Question

If you decide to go on an adventure, you would have had to have learned about it, or heard about it somewhere. These are both things acquired with language. The language in an advertisement, when your friend talks about an experience, the language on a social media post these are all examples of using words or photos to convince or inspire someone to go on an adventure. Also, language is often used to down play the negative and up play the positive, it can use words to make something sound way better than it actually is. It can be very persuasive and used in ways to convince somebody to go.

What Helped me Get There

Adventure Week

In order to create a campaign advertising Oregon, PLP 8 went on a field study to Oregon. Because of personal reasons I couldn’t go. Instead, I had an adventure week in school. I was assigned with cresting an adventure book documenting all of the adventures I went on, I want to go on, and that I researched. This assignment really helped me get a good grasp on what an adventure is, as well as helped me improve my advertising skills.

Read my book here:

Quarry Rock Advertisement 

Another thing that helped me answer the driving question was creating my quarry rock advertisement. This was the first stab at creating Ads that I took and it was the thing that helped me understand what makes a good advertisement. When I first handed in the Ad I got feedback on what I had to revise, I was told to make it less cluttered and more simple. This feedback helped me throughout the project as it was something I kept in mind as I created my campaign.

Exhibition Reflection

Once we finished our campaign, it was time to share our work to the public at the spring exhibition. We needed our campaign to be more engaging for the people watching. We decided to create a walking garden. We cut out cardboard squares, drew empty vases on them, and then poked holes above the drawing. We gave the cardboard vases to people looking at our campaign. They had to go through each station learn about Oregon, get a flower at each station, and then Boom! They would not only finish with a finished flower bouquet but also having gained knowledge about Oregon. 

I believe the exhibition went well, we all had our individual jobs that played off of our strengths. 

F.A.I.L (first attempts in learning)

If I were to do anything in this project over again, I would change how our exhibition display looked. I don’t think it was very aesthetic and I believe we could have spent more time decorating the tables.

What I learned

Through this project, I learned how to make a persuasive and effective advertisement in order to convince someone to go on an adventure. I thought about my values of a good and adventurous time, which lead me to discover how special and interesting the ocean is to me. I had an adventure with a new book genre and learned I really enjoy reading adventure books. I learned abut a new food and tasted something I would have never tried otherwise. I listened to other peoples adventure experiences, which taught me more about what adventure is. I learned all the steps of how to make an advertisement campaign. Also, I improved my public speaking skills while doing the exhibition.