The advertisement task

The advertising task presented new challenges for me as it was unlike any project I had under taken before. Creating campaigns and commercials are different from my usual short dramas, everything has to be positive and centralised around a product and a company, rather than a character and narrative. To help with this issue we started the week by researching many different advertising campaigns in order to analyse how they are so influential. Two that really inspired my group were campaigns by Hieneken and  Old Spice Deoderant. The Heineken ad seemed straight forward, a character becomes the life of the party while drinking the beer, though this plays heavily on the Late ideas of advertising, by having him drink the beer as he does his thing, it gives the viewer idea that theirs lives and popularity can be changed simply by buying the product, and that's something our adverts should aim to do.

Old Spice was interesting because it breaks all the rules in terms of the subtleties of advertising, acted Terry Crews screams at the viewer about the strength and over all supremacy of the deodorant  in a way that hasn't been seen before in advertising, and this aggression and in your face attitude is extremely memorable as it stand out. It's also extremely funny as it uses surreal techniques, such as journeying insides Crews armpit to show how good it now smells. Breaking the rules like this is something I will look to do on the project.

We were then put into groups to come up with our own product and campaign to sell it, given vague words to use as inspiration, ours being Brick. From this we came up with brick products that exist and decided that Brick phones would be the best selling point, as phones are arguably the biggest selling product right now but, at the same time, as we found through group discussions, could be improved by going back to being more like a brick, due to their strength, durability and security.
We researched more and found that IPhone ads were very successful at putting across the sleek and  improved features of the new phones.  We decided it would be interesting to parody this by running similar adverts for showing old-fashioned phone we had secured from a relative.  We also supported this with a new type of advert being seen a lot recently featuring interviews with potential customers who review the device, this has it latent affect on the viewer who sees the customers and relates to them as themselves  rather than a hired actor who is being paid to say good things.  However the interviewers were actors and were fed lines that we felt would appeal to customers in today's market.