Ad Reflection - Nov. 2

Andrew Rehling

WRT 150

Rinke

November 2, 2012

Advertisement reflection

            Going into this assignment, I was a little nervous about trying to get this assignment done. The page length of five to seven pages seemed pretty hard to achieve and I didn’t have a full understanding of ethos, pathos, and logos pertaining to an advertisement. Besides most of the requirements I thought it was quite interesting and exciting thinking about and trying to decide how I could redesign an ad. There were many ideas that were sort of running around in my head about I how I can could do this assignment. I used an issue of Sports Illustrated and figured that I will be easy to redesign an ad that was target for youth males because I fit into that audience which would make it easier to take apart and redesign. Also, if I found an ad that was interesting to me, it would make the assignment a lot less stressful to work on and hopefully keep that assignment interesting and nothing dreadful.

 I tried to look for a very basic type of advertisement after almost using the funniest advertisement that I could find. Originally, I was planning on using a Snickers ad that really appealed to my interest. I thought it was perfect, except there was nothing about it I really wanted to change, thus making a redesign more difficult, so I found a very basic looking ad. When I found how bland and boring the JVC ADIXXION ad looked, I figured that that ad just needed the redesign. There wasn’t much special about it, unless you are a diehard extreme sports fan but other than that there no good attention grabbers that I noticed, so I figured it would be easy to take apart and remake for a different audience.

            For the redesign, I tried to picture a few different types of audiences that would like the ad. The two I thought of right away were for female or family audiences. I wanted to include humor into the ad to be an attention grabber so I figured that would be easier to achieve if I was targeting just a female audience, so I focused on visualizing a funny scenario that included the family and show off how durable the camera is at the same time. I had two pictures in my head of the average middle class like family that went for a bike ride in pouring rain, or skiing in midst of a blizzard; a couple of extreme environments to help advertise the durability of the camera as well as get attention. I couldn’t decide which one I liked more, so I used both for the ad.

Some challenges of starting the essay were where to begin. I was originally going to get to the point of the essay, no introductions, but if I were to do this, I wouldn’t give much of a background on what I am doing, or show what I have learned about advertisements and their redesigns. I liked the amount of creativity that was involved with this. When I can open up my thoughts, opinions, and my imagination, usually that makes an assignment easier, fun, and it feels like it’s more worth doing. I learned how to break down advertisements, make assessments, and changes, and how to figure out a certain audience, and how to address one too. If I did get the chance to rewrite this essay, I would try to make everything transition and flow better with everything that I had talked about, instead of all the clean cut facts and details that I felt I put into an almost listing type of format.