Our 2nd project of the year was all about media and its message. Our driving question for this project was; “How does what we hear, read, and see influence us”?
It influences us by making us more aware of products and services that are available. It also may influence our opinions on things as well as your personal beliefs.
This post will focus on the milestones that helped me answer the question most, as well as my final group advertisement drafts.
Looking back, I think that all of the Milestones and Stepping stones helped me to answer the question, however these are the ones that helped the most.
Milestone 2 was about finding a piece of media, and finding the message, as well as the target audience. This Milestone really helped me understand more because it included more practice on dissecting texts. Because for Milestone 1 we did something similar and I thought I did a poor job analyzing the text we were assigned. So it was good to get another assignment similar to the first, and I thought I grew a lot from this milestone. The circular competency in this assignment was Comprehending Texts.
Milestone 5 was about using examples from both Marshall McLuhan’s text, as well as examples from the book we recently read, “The Gospel according to Larry”, to answer the question: “How does the Medium influence the Message”? The text we read by Marshall McLuhan was all about why “ The Medium is the Message”, and explained thoroughly how the medium influences the message. The book we read, “The Gospel according to Larry”, was related to the McLuhan text because both text’s demonstrated how powerful the media can be. It helped me a lot because it challenged me to find out why the medium is the message, as well as finding the connections between the book and the text. In addition, it was important because the McLuhan text that we read answered plenty on how the media grabs our attention and how it changes us. The circular competency in this assignment was “Use evidence from various sources”.
My project group in this project got Arms Reach Bistro as our Deep Cove buiseness to create an ad for. In this project, we included our drafts, questions, and information in a Team Launch journal. We started the process in the “Ask” folder of our journal by brainstorming questions for our buiseness, as we were getting ready to interview them. For our interview, the owner of our buiseness requested an in-person interview at his restaurant. During our interview, we asked general questions about what he wanted advertised, as well as who our ad should be targeted at. The owner wanted us to focus on the younger audience, as his restaurant seemed to be tagged as a “date” night restaurant. After receiving those recommendations, we eventually chose to focus on their Alfredo pasta, one of their kid menu dishes.
After all putting work into the first group draft, here’s what we created:
We thought it would make the ad more attractive to have a kid themed border, as well as the heart hovering over the Alfredo pasta.
We later received some feedback on the draft from the owner and he had thought that it looked good. He also said that he wanted us to incorporate the “Pharmacy” font and possibly the “Candara” font, as those our the fonts that his buiseness uses regularly.
So we took that into consideration and created a 2nd draft:
In this draft we included the fonts the owner wanted us to use and also played around with the addresses font.
We had thought that it looked better with the “Pharmacy font” as opposed to the first font we used.
Later in the project, we got Derek Hepburn, an expert in advertising, to look at our drafts and give feedback.
He really liked how we used the kid-themed border, and liked the heart. He recommended that we get rid of the “at” and make the “Kids love Alfredo pasta” bigger. He also wanted us to incorporate more colour in the “Arms reach bistro” text.
We took Derek’s advice and created this:
We had made the text bigger, and tried to find a good colour for the “Arms Reach Bistro”, however nothing worked well so we stocked with black. Also, we followed up on him saying in the meeting, to try to stick with 1 font, in an effort to keep things simple.
In conclusion, I really enjoyed working with other people on one task, and I also enjoyed creating our individual ads, as well as our group ones. Milestone 5 helped me answer the driving question the most because it challenged me to figure out why the Medium is the Message. I also found it really interesting to get advice and feedback from a real pro in what we were doing. In all, I loved this project and enjoyed collaborating with a buiseness that I love.
Here’s the links to my group members blogs: http://www.blog44.ca/aliciah/ http://www.blog44.ca/davidp/ http://www.blog44.ca/caleg/ http://www.blog44.ca/sepausd/
Here’s a link to my recent formative post: