Advertising Campaign Project

Introduction
Large companies pay big bucks for creative and effective advertising campaigns. You’re lucky enough to have just been hired to develop an advertising campaign for a new product. You will develop a variety of advertising types and techniques to promote your product.

Purpose                                                                                                         
To develop an appealing advertisement campaign. This webquest will help you become a more persuasive person as well as help you recognize and manage the influential attempts of others. It will also make you a better consumer. You will be able to spot tricks of advertising and avoid falling into traps set for consumers. For example, one famous trap included the subliminal suggestions during movies that caused movie goers to go to the snack bar even though they were not immediately aware of seeing the images and weren’t even hungry. Effective citizenship requires us to think critically about what we hear, see, and read. Now you can practice how to hear, see, and read propaganda for what it really is.

Task
You will work with a partner to gather information about advertising and use that information to develop an advertising campaign for your product. In order to do a quality job on any project, it is important to research the options. This adventure begins with a little exploration on the web. You will define propaganda techniques, make an outline of historical ads, learn the necessary elements in a good ad promotion, listen to famous slogans, and critique ads found on the internet. After you’ve developed an understanding of propaganda techniques, you’re ready to develop your own ad campaign.

Choose one of the five products listed below to develop an Ad Campaign around:

·             A Toy

·             A Car

·             An article of clothing

·             A Music CD

·             A Book

·             A Professional Sports Team

·             Other

Your purpose is to choose one of those products and make it appealing to others.

Process

Step 1. In your own handwriting, list and define the common advertising techniques listed here. (EACH group member must turn their own handwritten paper in for a grade)

Step 2. Find examples of seven of the techniques from #1 in magazines, the web, or recorded off the radio or television. Prepare each example for presentation. The presentation must include an explanation of the sample technique (written and verbal) and a visual representation of the ad. Your visual can be pasted onto poster board for display or put into a Powerpoint presentation. Any examples used from TV or Radio must be recorded and shown during your presentation. Each recorded TV or Radio Ad will be worth 5 bonus points.

Step 3. It is wise to learn from the past, for it helps us live better in the future. Explore the history of advertising. Develop a timeline that outlines at least ten popular advertising campaigns from the 1920’s through the 1990’s. Be sure to include some war propaganda from the WWII era.

Some Resources for #3: Brief History, Reader's Companion, 1850-1920, 19th Century, Classic TV, Historic Ad Campaigns
*If these sources don't give you enough information, try your own search for advertising timelines, advertising campaigns, etc.

Step 4. Write a five paragraph essay explaining the elements of a good ad campaign. Click here for an explanation on how to write a 5 paragraph essay. Start with this resource for your information: Advertising Mini-Course. Also take some time to do your own search on the net for more information on this topic.

Step 5. List ten real-life popular slogans from the last 70 years and their products. For each slogan listed, write a one-paragraph explanation of why you think the slogan listed is popular and effective. *Your explanation must include discussions of advertising techniques and insights and how the product in question successfully combined these techniques with their slogan to create a popular ad campaign AND include a graphic copied from the internet to accompany your analysis. In other words, you're to list the product and its slogan, and discuss the entire ad campaign that went (or is currently going with) it.

 

Step 6. Develop an advertising campaign for your product. It must include a Slogan that is used in each of the following items, and an original LOGO created in Photoshop (the logo can NOT just be a copy and paste of an existing logo – you may use an existing logo for a starting point, but it must be altered to be originally yours – Logos should be between 1X1 inches and 2X2 inches at 200 dpi):

AD PLAN ASSIGNMENT: TURN IN THE FOLLOWING BEFORE YOU DO ANY WORK ON STEP 6: List the members of your group, the Product you chose, Your Slogan, and a printed copy of your ORIGINAL LOGO (make sure you keep a .psd version of your logo on your :H drive that does not have flattened levels).

*NOTE: EACH Advertisement MUST clearly use at least one of the Advertising Techniques studied in class and linked on the class webpage at EDLINE

·             Magazine Cover (8X10, 200 Resolution)

§  Select a magazine with a readership that would logically fall into the demographic of your product

·             2 Full Page Magazine Ads (Photoshop Assignment)

§  Follow the guidelines gone over in class, and found here

§  Each Ad must use the same slogan and logo, but be different in every other aspect

·             2 Newspaper Ads (Photoshop)

§  One 5X3in, 200 resolution

§  One 3X5in, 200 resolution

§  Newspaper Ads are primarily BLACK AND WHITE

1.      You MAY include one, and only one, spot color in your newspaper ads

1.      Spot color is one SOLID color to use for a background element, text, an object in your graphic, etc. Spot color DOES NOT include different shades of one color, so you can not use the “Hue/Saturation” tool to retain details on objects with different shading so choose carefully where you use the spot color because it will remove detail wherever it is used.

·             Billboard (Photoshop)

§  Find a “Billboard” photo off the internet and save it to your :H Drive.

§  It must be a minimum of 1000X1000 PIXELS.

§  Open the billboard pic in Photoshop, use the polygon lasso tool to select the billboard itself and delete the existing advertisement so you are left with a blank white space.

§  Do all your work in this file, filling the blank white space with your own Advertisement.

§  To turn in, resize the whole file (go Image>Image Size and plug in numbers smaller than 8X11 inches so it fits on a page), then print your file to turn in.

·             Flyers

o   Using Photoshop or a program such as Microsoft Publisher, create 3 different flyers meant for display to advertise your product.

Step 7. Final Presentation of your Ad Campaign (each item from #6). Approach the presentation as if you are an advertising company presenting your ideas to a company in the hopes of being hired as their advertising company.