Week 1

After a long, very cold and wet journey to Parkside we started our new CRAM project. This project focuses on advertising and photography. Both things that us as the public are subjected to daily and something I am interested to  learn more about. Mr Hind lead a group discussion about the different mediums possible to advertise with. We came up with the obvious ones in a matter of minutes. Mediums such as TV, film, newspaper, magazines and the Internet. We discussed the way people use the Internet to advertise which is very usefully for advertisers. It is a very effective medium as on such websites as facebook there is so much information about people that advertisers can use to exclusively advertise to a target audience. That's extremely useful for company's and although facebook advertising space is extremely expensive I'm sure if the product or service being sold has any substance it's a cost worth it. However, i don't believe the adverts are very effective. I am a regular facebook user and have hardly ever clicked on adds. They're sloppy and the effort isn't put in. The adds aren't clever, they are too obvious. Maybe a picture of the product and a price will be shown as if in a supermarket which doesn't persuade me unless the product is something amazing and I've seen before.

After talking extensively about the different mediums of advertising we began to discuss different styles of advertising campaigns. A different thing all together. There are three main styles of campaign which are rather different. They are campaigns that raise awareness, such as adverts discouraging smoking and warning or road dangers. Those campaigns are generally quite emotive, they focus on fear and sadness to make the viewer fear or feel pity for the things in the adverts. But despite their emotive nature there needs to be a lot of information as well otherwise they would not serve thier puepose.

Campaigns advertising a POV are slightly different tho ones that raise awareness. When raising POV people take a more comedic and ironic aproach, trying to get people to laugh. This, I believe this is for a good reason. They focus on endering the viewer to the person or organisation who has a view. They do not want to accociate fear or sadness with them or their POV.

Adverts however that advertise a product or service aim for a very interesting, slightly illogical but effective technique. They focus on different storylines or characters and exclude the product untill the end of the advert or hint at it throughout. Successful adverts create an emotion very effectivley. Whever the viewer then feels that emotion they think of the product. Or when they think of the product they feel the emotion. Thats why adverts are funny, happy and warming. They want happy customers at the end of the day.