Lesson on adverts

Today we did very fun activities in college, involving adverts and all forms of advertisement. We started off by printing off an advert of our own choice from Google. We then wrote about the different methods used to advertise and grab the reader’s attention. I chose an advert for the documentary titled, ‘Autism: A Curious case of the human mind’.  I pointed out how unique the picture of the brain was and how it really stood out in the advert. It looked rather like a map of space.

I found out that there are six categories that adverts tend to fall into. These categories include realist, anti – realist, animation, documentary, talking heads and stand alone series. We watched a number of video adverts on YouTube and decided which category they fell into. Some of the adverts were okay, others were intentionally hilarious and others were just so terrible that they were funny to watch whether that was the original intention or not.

I was asked to find a couple of adverts on YouTube and write about the categories they would each fall into as well as the effects and methods they used. One of my choices was an advert for Wotsits from the 1980s. It was effective in that it continuously used the word ‘what’ to make people want to keep watching. I watched another one that was more recent about Mr Bean eating a Snickers chocolate bar. Mr Bean turned into a skilled ninja once he had eaten the bar. The advert was meant to show how nobody is themselves when they’re hungry. Mr Bean is obviously a very popular character. I feel like adding Mr Bean to the ad is a way to ensure that people will watch it. I love Mr Bean myself so I would definitely watch almost any advert that had him in it and I think a lot of other people would as well. This makes the inclusion of Bean the ideal method of getting hits to promote their chocolate bar.

I believe that at some point, we’re meant to work on creating our own video adverts as part of the course. We were also told to think about the ‘not so good’ adverts and aim to avoid making the mistakes that they did.

Below you can watch the two adverts I looked into.