Understanding Advertising Campaigns

On this page:

• Purpose
• Past Student Example
• Answer These Questions in your Assignment
• What is Advertising?
• What is an Ad Campaign?
• What Can an Ad Campaign Accomplish?
• What is a Performance Benefit?
• Headlines and Body Copy
• The Tone of an Advertisement
• Campaign Strategies
• Socially Conscious Branding
• Ads Found by Students
• Assignment Process

Purpose:

Read and view the images on this entire page to gain an understanding of what advertising is and how ad campaigns work. Find 2 advertisements — static, animation, slides, or video ads — for a product, or service, or message, or brand that are part of the same campaign (i.e., have the same or similar tagline). Download or screenshot still frames from the 2 ads and write answers to the questions about why they are successful and work well as a campaign. Use any app (Word, Photoshop, etc) to set up your assignment document and then make a PDF copy of your original file to submit to both the Discussion and Assignment pages. Provide feedback on 2 other student’s projects. It’s important that your assignment includes high resolution copies (downloads or screenshots) of the two found advertisements and that they represent the key components of how the ad communicates its message. Make sure the images of the ads are not distorted (stretched or pinched), maintain the original visual proportions, and show the full frame of the ad (not cropped). If the ad text is blurry or too small to read, please write the words of the ad below the screenshots in your assignment document. If the ad has spoken words, music, or sound, please describe the audio track elements in detail in your assignment document.

Answer these Questions in your Assignment:

1. What is the tagline used in the campaign?
2. Who is sponsoring these ads?
3. What is the benefit being sold or the main message of these two ads?
4. Who is the target audience?
5. How did you come to that conclusion? What elements (words, images, colors, typefaces, design layout, etc.) indicate the intended audience? Provide specific details.
6. What elements help get the message across? How is the story or main point being communicated?
7. What indicates that these two ads are truly part of one campaign?

NOTE: Please use full sentences when answering assignment questions and posting comments in the discussions.