The Importance of Ad Placement

 

A friend of mine had posted this image of two billboard advertisements on his facebook wall. I thought it was a great example of effective use of placement & context, as well as clever tag lines. The billboard on the left displays an Audi automobile with the tag line "Your move, BMW." while the billboard ad on the right, from BMW (Audi's competitor in the automobile industry) states, "Checkmate." Just wanted to share something that pertains to my learning adventure in my advertising art direction class. If anything so far, the class has made me more aware of the thought process involved in advertisements that I encounter on a day to day basis. This is just an example of one of them that caught my eye.

Issue Advertisements: Initial Concept Sketches

 

Today in class we brought in our 40 concept sketches for our issue advertisements for Professor Jimmy Moss to review and give us feedback. As seen in the picture above, these were initial sketches that were very roughly done. This was to help start getting our ideas for our Pro & Con ads physically down on paper to begin to see how they might pan out and what ideas were effective or not. 

After my team's meeting with Jimmy, we had a better idea as to what ideas we should further develop and which we should discard totally. Our mission for next class is to complete another 40 sketches, but this time they must be more comprehensive and complete. The imagery has to be more clear as well as what relative size the image and type will be. Another important element to include in these next sketches is the placement of the copy information & call to action. Overall, these sketches need to be more complete and concise than the previous ones. They should look more like ads and not just jotted down ideas.

Topic Idea Research

Today in class, our professor pulled samples of good ads out of a few magazines he brought in. He then proceeded to ask us why they were good advertisements and what could still be improved about them. He even had some of us pitch the ideas behind the advertisements as if we were trying to sell the ideas to a client. This was to help us further understand ourselves what elements are effective to an audience and what the creative thinking process behind good advertisements are.

After that, each of our groups had to propose our topic for the pro & con advertisement project we are currently starting to work on. My partner, Candy, and myself proposed our topic of abortion and gave examples of each opposing view on the topic to show that we had done our research and know enough about the topic in order to effectively create ads that persuade the audience to either do something to stop abortion and take action to fight for it as an option. It is important to fully know as much as possible about the different viewpoints concerning this controversial issue so that we in turn create advertisements that capture the attention of our audience(s).

My team's task from now until next class is to come up with  40 different concept sketches (20 pro-abortion & 20 anti-abortion). Each concept includes a focal visual element and a tag line. I will post some of these concept sketches as they progress.

Example of a current pro-abortion (pro-choice) ad.

Recovered!

After a brief session of panic & self-taught cacheing techniques, I found my post deep within the internet world! Heads up for others in my class that may have the same problem: Google reader will usually back up your posts.  Here's my post from the first week of class:

Sunday, January 15, 2012

Demographics in Advertisement

A highly important aspect of great advertisement is knowing your audience (demographic) and most importantly being aware of what specific media they will most likely view and therefore also view your ad in the same publication or other form of media.  By knowing this, companies can target their audience and potential customers more effectively.

In class this past Wednesday, each student in the class had to bring in 3 separate examples of well done advertisements.  I found it interesting that just by looking at the ads, it was pretty obvious what publication each specific ad came from and what particular audience they were trying to grasp. For example: Old Spice deodorant as well as alcohol ads were found in magazines geared towards men, like GQ and Maxim and were geared to be appealing towards the male mentality.  Beauty products and designer fashion ads were found in fashion & lifestyle magazines geared towards women, like Vogue and Cosmopolitan.  If the male geared ads were to be in Vogue, they wouldn't be effective since they would be trying to sell a male product to a mainly female consumer base and vice-versa.  Old Spice knows that their consumer would most likely be.

Oops!

I have accidentally deleted my post from week one, since I had thought I had only removed my drafts. Will try to see if they are backed up somehow.

Week 2: Controversial Social Topic Ads

It's two weeks into the quarter and we finally got to find out what our first project is. In class, as teams of two, we had to discuss and choose a topic that is controversial and could be argued for and against. Our actual assignment it to create two black and white ads that are theoretically for the Los Angeles Times. One ad will be the pro side of the topic chosen and the other will argue the con side. The goal of this project is to successfully create persuasive ads for both sides of the issue, no matter what your personal beliefs or feelings are about the matter.

Our project was first introduced through a current social topic, which is SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act).  The Online Piracy Act invades our rights as Americans to free speech and polices the internet and how we experience the web. It is a very important issue in our society today and I was shocked as to how many of my peers didn't know what it was. Anyways, it was brought up because there are two sides to the online piracy act: Ownership of material such as music, movies, art, etc. vs. freedom of expression, free speech, and an un-policed internet. No matter how we felt about it, we had to consider both sides of this current issue equally, which was admittedly difficult to do since I for one have strong opinions about the matter.

During class when we announced what topics we wanted to tackle for our project, my group's idea of the death of publishing books, newspapers, etc. vs. e-readers didn't go over well. My goal was to come up with a topic that effects us as a society. It didn't seem to go over well because as I found out, no one seemed to care an ounce.  Now I'm going with a typical, but I guess controversial enough topic: abortion.