The end of the year is almost here! What comes with that? The Spring Exhibition! The exhibition was chaos, the good kind. All of the grade 8’s made advertisements for businesses we visited on our Oregon field study. The ads we created were to understand the answer to our driving question, “How does advertising persuade, sell, and influence society?” I was assigned to the Wolf Haven group, which happened to be the best business (I’m definitely not biased 😉). Wolf Haven is a hands-off sanctuary for wolves who have been in the pet trade. Wolf Haven works to protect wolves and educate people of all ages about wolves. I loved visiting Wolf Haven and had the pleasure of having a 20 minute in depth interview with one of their staff members.

Prior to making our ads we learned about different advertising techniques including logos, ethos and pathos. Logos uses evidence, logic, or reasoning to convince consumers. Pathos persuades people via evoking emotions. Ethos creates credibility of a brand by using celebrity or professional endorsements, whether real or perceived. I focused on the use of pathos in my advertisement. I felt this method was appropriate to try and draw interest through emotion. I thought is was the easiest and most logical way to promote Wolf Haven’s message. This technique is very commonly used when promoting brands involving animals. Here is the evolution of my ad.

During the Spring Exhibition I enjoyed talking to people about Wolf Haven and my approach to advertising the organization. It was great sharing about Wolf Haven and walking visitors through the process of building my ad. I personally enjoyed meeting my peer’s family members. Oddly enough my favorite part of the night was rolling up the mats at the end of the evening. Ms. Kadi took a video of us yelling “child labor!”. I felt a real connection to my classmates as we were all working together to finish our year off, working towards a common goal and laughing while doing it.

If I were to have an opportunity to do this over I would’ve created an outline of bullet points I wanted to mention to those interested in Wolf Haven.

Unfortunately I didn’t get the chance to visit all the other grade’s projects. Next exhibition hopefully we will have set breaks like the Winter Exhibition did.

Overall there were a number of highlights and learnings from this exhibition that I will use to improve my contributions to future exhibitions.

Thanks for reading!