On Tuesday we had a company called M&C Saatchi coming in. People go to this company to give them their ideas, then they produce an advert for their product.
A man called Rob came in and explained to us what his company makes and what he himself does for the company.
After the brief introduction he showed us a few t.v adverts and asked us what we liked about them and why we think they will be succesful in the advertising industry. One of the Casburty adverts was displayed to us as an example and we were made to give our opinions, we were also thinking about the advertising techniques.
Some of them are:
1) you could make an advert that has nothing to do with the product but its a good technique because it sticks in your head. This is what the cadburys advert does.
2) do not visually show the product but have some kind of verbal description.
3) making the advert stand out by being different and abstract in comparison to other adverts.
4) relate to the target audience, do something you know will interest a certain target audience.
5) involve the audience, maybe see it from their point of view. e.g the camera being them.
Once we had done this starter activity we were put into groups of five and were asked to design a poster about teenage traffic accidents (transport for london).
In our group, firstly we put our ideas together and thought of ways we could present this information by being different, eye catching and informative.
Once we had around five ideas, we had to pick one of them that we could develop and started thinking about how we could present it as a poster.
Our main idea was to keep everything steriotypical e.g. have teenagers on the street, a gang of girls and a gang of boys talking to eachother. We think that the more it relates to teenagers, the more interested they will be in the poster. We're going to have the main girl in pink, the main boy in blue and the rest of the scene in a black and white sketched style.
Once we had developed our ideas, we started to design the poster. Everyone had their own designated job and after a few minutes we got started.
Whilst making the poster we were also asked to think of whereabouts we could put the advertisement.
Some of the places we came up with were:
1) On the outside of buses
2) On the tv.
3) On the internet
4) On billborads
5) In leaflets
6) On a helicopters banner
7) Getting a text message whilst in a certain area
8) On bus stops
9) Shop windows
After this we were given around an hour to complete the poster and we finally completed our task. Then we had to present our ideas. Watching the other groups was quite useful because we could see how there were different ways to present the same information and I was surprised about how different the other groups were, and how they had developed their ideas.
When we got up and presented our work, that for me was probably the most challenging part because I don't find it that easy to explain myself and especially because our poster was well developed I couldn't really explain it very well. I decided to just let someone else explain it because there were stronger speakers in the group than me. But I know that could be one of my targets for next time we are presenting information.
I think our group was quite successful because everyone else in the class were thinking to do things that were very abstract and different, whereas I believe in this case it's best to just stick to something simple but eye catching especially because our target audience is teenagers and I know by personal experience that teenagers don't really pay much attention to posters about crossing the road because there are so many and it just seems like everything being repeated.
If I had the chance to do this activity again, I would probably try to do something abstract rather than realistic to see the effect it has on me and how far you can develop it.
The part I enjoyed the most was probably putting our first ideas into it, because I like the fact that when you have a simple first idea you can develop it in so many different ways so I like keeping everything open ended.
