Local Business Ad

We started our unit on advertising by making an ad for a local business. I was in a group with Jordyn, Luciano, and Ben and our business was Capilano Builders. We interviewed Chelsea to learn more about her business and advertising needs. Some of the questions we asked were:

• Are there specific products you want to advertise?
• What colours and themes do you want in the ad?
• Do you have an existing slogan or would you like us to create one?
• Can you provide with some images of your renovation projects?

Initially I came up with the vision of a wish list and an ad with checkboxes. However, the layout was too crowded and so I abandoned that style, but I kept the slogan: “Turn your wish list into a reality.” This became a consistent piece in all my drafts and final ad. After the first draft we were told that the ad could only contain our own photos, photos provided by the business, or images from the internet that are not protected by copyright. Over the next few drafts I made changes to the text, images and background in order to create my final ad.

Oregon Business Ad

The next part of the project required making an ad for an Oregon business. My business was the Pig’n Pancake restaurant at Cannon Beach.

We created our first draft before going to Oregon so I used their company website to get ideas. I also researched restaurant ads and decided on a layout where the full background is an image of the food. In order to make the text readable I had to fade the image and my critique showed that advertising a restaurant by fading out food isn’t the best idea. I then changed to use three images in a row as that was a common feature in many restaurant ads. These are the four versions of my ad including what I thought would be my final version.

Version Two of my Oregon Ad

The feedback from my teachers on the “final” draft explained that while it was good I had tried to take a risk, the layout of the entire ad really didn’t work. There were too many issues to try and salvage anything from this ad (except for the pig logo) so I choose to restart. I featured my pancake photo as this was the best image I had from my visit to the restaurant. I went back to their website for inspiration and decided to use their colour scheme and font for the company name. I also came up with a new tagline which reflects the home-cooking, cozy vibe of the restaurant. This ad looked so much better, however in class the next week we did more critique. It was a busy session of hard work to get it done. After making a few more adjustments I landed on my final ad.

Challenges

I’ve done a lot of editing of videos and photos through apps, but Canva was new to me and I found it very frustrating. It’s hard to get control over the position of images and text, and some basic features like adjusting shapes do not work very well. I did try experimenting with other apps, such as Phonto and Comic Life, and ended up using a combination of Phonto and Canva to make my ads.

I had a tough time with my Oregon ad as we weren’t able to interview anyone at the Pig’n Pancake. While every other group got critique and ideas from their business we just had to use our own knowledge to try and make our ads better. At some points I got very frustrated because I wasn’t happy with the ad and wasn’t sure how to make it better and the feedback I got from my peers wasn’t very useful. I just tried to get lots of critique from everyone around me (including reluctantly taking advice from my brother)!

One of the key things I learned from this unit is to get feedback early and often and not be afraid to change direction if my current path isn’t really working.