Ok. Wow. The Medium is the Message is finally over, and it was really fun. Learning about designing ads was especially cool. The driving question of the project was “How does what we see, hear and read influence us?”. I think by now, I have a pretty good understanding of that question. We are influenced greatly by what we hear, read and see. Every day, we see advertisements on bus stops, we hear commercials on the radio and we read about other peoples’ opinions in books. Believe it or not, reading books about other peoples’ opinions can influence us quite a bit. For example, if you only read books about another person’s opinion, and only read about things from their point of view, chances are, your own opinion would be swayed in the direction of theirs. Going back in the direction of advertisement, say you were walking down the street, and you passed a bus stop. There is an ad on the side of the bus stop advertising a new coffee machine. You go to pick up some groceries and the store is carrying that same coffee machine. If you needed a coffee machine, chances are, you would buy that one, rather than another brand, because that advertisement you saw at the bus stop told you about all the good things about that coffee machine, and probably made you feel like that is the best coffee machine out there, or at least the best coffee machine at your local grocery store. Ads can also convince you to buy a certain type of product. Like, say you are driving to get lunch at a coffee shop, and you hear an ad on the radio talking about McDonald’s and why you should eat there. This makes you remember how much you wanted a burger and so you drive to a different place to eat a hamburger. The ad served its purpose, just not the way it intended to. It still made you get a burger, just not a McDonald’s burger. To condense that, we are influenced by what we hear, read and see in quite a few ways. Our opinions are changed, we are convinced to do certain things, such as buying certain products, or types of products, and even our views on issues going on in the world can be changed.

I think that one of the things that helped me realize a lot about the techniques that are used when designing an ad was the advertising photo journal. Basically, we were asked to take pictures of ads in our daily lives and every week we chose the best ad out of all the ads. We talked about the strategies used in making the ad, why the ad was made, who the target audience was, and so on. I think this helped me quite a lot. Another thing that I feel helped me understand alot about what goes into making an ad and gearing it towards its target audience was Milestone 3: Historical Analysis. I chose a Coca-Cola ad from 1986 and wrote about how they directed their ad towards their target audience. It was really cool to learn about why they advertised what they did, and how peoples views have changed on advertising since the ad was released. You can find my review of the Coca-Cola ad in my last blog post:

Reflection on Advertisement Drafts

I feel like it is worth noting that my friend’s dad is a history professor and he wrote his thesis on Coca-Cola in Germany, and he said that my review was pretty good, so I’m pretty happy about that.

As noted in my last post, we were asked to create an ad for a business. My group chose The Raven Pub, and I feel like it went pretty well. In my last post, I included all of my advertisement drafts, but since then we have decided on one final advertisement, so here is our final draft:

Like it? Wow, that much? Holy cow, you’re saying that if you let a group of thirteen year olds create an ad for your professional business, you would want it to look just like this? Didn’t think so, because you probably wouldn’t let a group of thirteen year olds create an ad for your professional business. I’m surprised The Raven actually OK’d this, and I’m very proud of our ad. My one complaint is that we decided to remove the QR code from the ad. I do admit that it was just a bit too much, but it was a good idea to have a QR code.

When we started this project, I didn’t really have any understanting of how I am influenced by things around me. I was confused by what “The Medium is the Message” actually meant, and the only experience I had with writing about adversidement was a project I chose to do in 5th grade in which I learned what plagiarism is… the hard way (basically the entire project was copied from Wikipedia and other various websites, because I had no idea that you weren’t supposed to do that). Now, I feel like I have gained a greater understanding of how I am influenced by everything that I consume and I have learned a lot about advertisement.

So in conclusion, I feel like this project was a success. I learned a lot and had fun making ads for an actual business. I feel like I will pay more attention to ads and other things that influence me in my daily life. I thought that working with an actual business was awesome and hopefully we do more of that kind of stuff in the future. For now though, I think I’m all media’d out for the day. I hope you enjoyed reading this post, which was 980 words long, if you were wondering, and I’ll see you next time.

Bye!

Dylan