We got a new project! This time it’s all about advertising, with the driving question being “How does what we see, read, and hear influence us.” Since this is our second project,  we had a little bit more of an understanding of the project path. We started with the Launch path, in which we were introduced to the crazy world of advertising and were told what the end product of this project would be. 

It turns out, we get to make an ad for a real business! However before we can start making ads, we had to build some knowledge and that means writing paragraphs (Sigh). So far we’ve had to write three paragraph, each analyzing different ads.

The first ad we looked at was Welcome Home by Apple, in which we had to write a paragraph about the message and the target audience of the Ad. Overall I think I did a pretty decent paragraph. I made a few mistakes like not indenting (my elementary teachers thought indenting didn’t matter), plus I went completely off topic in the second half of my paragraph.

Milestone 2 and 3 were pretty similar to milestone 1. In each of them we had to chose an ad then write a paragraph analyzing it. For Milestone 2, I picked the Apple ad 1984, which in my opinion made the milestone a lot harder then it should have been. You see, I haven’t actually read the book “1984”, which the ad was based of. So I was missing a lot of information right off the bat, which made writing a paragraph analyzing the ad quite a bit harder. On top of that, we also had to talk about historical perspective. In the end, I think historical perspective was one of the hardest parts to get right. Thinking back to how someone might interpret an ad in the past was something I was just not good at. For milestone 3, we learned all about techniques and appeals, which I understood and didn’t have to much trouble on.

On top of these paragraphs, we also read a book called “The Gospel According to Larry” which is a book about anti-consumerism. Once a week, we completed a worksheet and talked about it to other people (kind of like a book club).

Okay, enough about building knowledge, time to talk about our advertisements. Speaking of which, did you know that this was our first group project? Yep, I need to work with other human beings. Shocking.

Together, we started working on making ads for our business of choice. (We chose Bluhouse Cafe.) We started by making a launch journal, which I thought was really useful. It was a place where everybody could see everyone’s work, and is very helpful in group projects.

However, the most game changing breakthrough of this group project, was messages. I know that might sound like common sense to set up a group chat at the start of a project, but I’ve never done it before.  Whenever I had to do a group project before, we would either set up a shared google document, or communicate through emails. None of which create enough communication to make a successful group. But with messages, you can just send your new draft to the group chat, and you’ll have feedback within minutes.

Speaking of drafts, here were mine!

The first 3 drafts that I did, I just focused on the design aspect since we hadn’t gotten any information from our business on what to advertise. (This may have been because our email address was wrong.) After we actually sent our email to the right person, we got a email back telling us to advertise their new delivery service. So for draft 4, I drew my own shopping cart with food in it to symbolize the online shopping cart. Draft 5 was the same as draft 4, but our group decided to change the layout and fonts, to make the ad look more interesting and modern. For draft 6, I decided to make a new ad, this time focusing on the “fresh organic food delivery, but without the waste” part. In the end, this ad was a pretty big failure. The layout and the message made no sense, and was quickly scraped. The one good part in this ad, is that I started to play around with food photography, which I find quite fun. I ended up taking around 20 pictures of blueberrys to try to find the perfect one.

For the first group project that we’ve done, I think this project has been going pretty successfully. My group has given and taken good feedback, and I think we’ve managed to create some pretty good ads. Hopefully our business likes them too.

P.S. special thanks to Bluhouse for helping us on our project, we couldn’t have done it without your help.