We live in a world were we are surrounded by media. With that media comes advertising. Ads for shoes, ads for food, ads for Raid Shadow legends, (not sponsored). They’re all around us, so I found it surprising that I’ve never learned about them. It seems like my teachers thought so as well.

Enter project 1 of Humanities 8 Medium is the Message

Our first humanities project was about media, more specifically, advertising. I knew what advertising was, but I would soon find out about the sheer amount of creativity, time, knowledge and strategies needed to create a good ad. It all starts with the driving question.

Driving Question:
 How does what we see, hear and read influence us.

 

What is in this post:

  • What did I do in this project?
  • Curricular Competencies
  • Strengths and weaknesses
  • Driving question and my answer to it

 

What did I do in this project?

This project is about making advertisements for local businesses, but I had no experience with making ads. So, before we could start working on this project, we had to learn some basics. We learned about some designs in the design principles workbook, watched and analyzed the Welcome home ad to learn about target audience, watched a short movie that taught us about how social media affects our lives and how it has affected our society. 

Curricular Competencies

The curricular competencies are the way/strategy which we learn. There are 7 steps to it, each with there own purpose. The main ones that we hear the most are the learning competencies. ’Launch’, ‘building knowledge’, ‘develop and critique’ and present and reflect. These are the steps which we use to learn about the ads, create the ads, and critique them to perfection. After that we’ll present our project and reflect on it. 

This project really helped me define my strengths and weaknesses in a team. I have made two short paragraphs below explaining them.

 

Strengths and Weaknesses

My biggest strength in this whole project was my ability to communicate with my team and teachers. If I couldn’t have been getting help from my teammates throughout the developing of my ad, I probably wouldn’t have an advertisement that I would be proud of. While I was developing ads I had lots of moments when I needed an outside view of what my work looked like and what I needed to change. Lots of mistakes that could’ve slipped through were fixed in that process.

My biggest weakness in this project was my lack of collaboration outside of school. A lot of what I did in this project was done outside of school, so I didn’t have my group right next to me to ask for help and critique. This is why my first ads didn’t look that interesting. At school I could simply ask for Ideas and I’d have five people blurting out thoughts and Ideas. At home I’d have to ask someone completely who doesn’t know much about this project or text the group and hope someone is online at the time. 

 

The Driving Question and my answer to it

Now let’s come back to the Driving Question: How does what we see, hear and read influence us.

Throughout the whole project, the teachers have been asking this every single class. It’s in Basecamp, but is still impossible to remember. The longer I was in the project, the more sense it made. As we were learning so much about these advertisements, I started to pay a little bit more attention to ads that I saw around me. It changed my everyday view because I could see who the ads could be targeted for, what kind of design they used, and what they were trying to highlight. I only learned these aspects of advertising because of this project. In an assignment a short bit ago there was a question very related to it, but it replaced the word media with YouTube and movies.

How does what we see, read, and watch on YouTube and in movies influence us.

This was my answer.

“Everything which we pay attention to brings us something in return. It could be knowledge, an idea, a thought, but it is always an influence. It makes us think about something. It keeps you interested and will make you want to spend your time doing it.”

After that I start talking about how there is an algorithm to keep your attention to show you more ads for more money, but that is the main answer that it can change our views on things and our thoughts. This can be for the better, like when you learn a new skill or for the worse by adopting a toxic and harmful ideology.

It is how you choose to view and use what we see around us that really shows.

Thank you for reading.