Visual Essay

For this essay you will need to find an ad with sufficient size and detail. Full page ads from magazines with large pages such as Rolling Stone or Premier would work very well, but most magazines will have ads with enough detail. Try to avoid using newspaper ads because they will often be too small and will not contain color. If you use ads from a print source, you will need to take a photo of them and upload it with your essay. You can also find ads online, but be sure they are ads for products and not a public service announcement. Online, you also have to look out for fake ads or vintage ads. You want something recent. If you find the ad in Google Images, be sure to click on the original link so you have the information for where you found it. Do NOT use sites that do the ad analysis for you – look for just the visual.

This essay will have two parts – an ad analysis and an audience analysis. For your ad analysis, you will first give a detailed description of the ad. Pretend that you are describing the ad to someone who cannot see it. Describe each detail, including text and pictures. Next, include a discussion of what the ad is arguing, both the obvious argument and any hidden ones. Think carefully about what the ad might be trying to get people to think or do. For the final piece of part one, you will include a rationale for why the ad is using the particular images on the page. For example, using beautiful women in a skin care ad makes female readers believe that they will also be beautiful if they use the product.

Part one of Essay #1 should be at least one page long.

For the second part of Essay #1, you need to include the following pieces (in this order):

1. A discussion of which magazine the advertisement came from and in which other magazines it might appear. For example, an ad for skin cream might have come from Seventeen, but it may also appear in Elle, Redbook, Vogue, and others. If you found the ad online, just state where you found it, but still try to determine what magazines it might be in. You may have to Google a bit if you aren’t familiar with magazines.

2. A discussion of the ad’s tone and why you, as the viewer, are interpreting that tone. For example, does the ad use any copy (text), or does it strictly have pictures? Do the colors in the ad communicate anything to you?

3. A description of the intended audience for the ad, including age, gender, income level, etc. BE SPECIFIC and DETAILED!

4. A re-working of the ad. Choose another target audience and explain how the ad would need to change to better reach that target group. For example, if you wanted to sell Converse tennis shoes to grandmothers, what sort of pictures or text would you use? How would you design the ad? (This needs to be significantly different from the original ad).

ESSAY #1 FINAL DRAFT SHOULD BE AT LEAST 2 FULL PAGES LONG

A successful Essay 1 will do the following things:

ü Include all of the steps of the assignment written in paragraph form without any “seams.”

ü Include as much detail as possible.

ü Demonstrate that the author has read the ad critically and understands what the ad is trying to communicate.

ü Demonstrate that the author has a solid understanding of how different audiences affect advertising (a good rationale for why the ad uses the images it does and how you would re-work the ad can demonstrate this concept).

ü Use appropriate grammar and sentence structure, avoiding sentence level mistakes.

Things to avoid:

• Spelling errors
• Use of the words “you” and      “your”
• Contractions
• Incomplete Sentences
• Vague words or vague      pronouns
• First person

You can always write more than the required length. I just like to give you a page length so that you know the minimum. Papers that don’t meet the minimum length requirement can’t score any higher than a D, so I recommend writing a bit more, just in case.

**All essays for the course need to be in MLA format, unless otherwise directed.