Ad analysis essay.
Description The purpose of this essay is to uncover and explain the many manipulative messages–and their consequences–in a print ad by utilizing theory and analysis. This assignment has multiple steps, including peer responses. As long as you follow the steps, you will have the opportunity to revise. The following steps are required: Start with an ad that interests you. It needs to be a glossy, full-page magazine ad (not a newspaper or other medium) of anything except food (including gum). Using the visual text analysis (VTA) questions and your own observations, create a detailed, thorough set of textual evidence to support the possible messages in the ad. Bring your ad to class so that your peers can consider the VTA questions for you in order to add to that body of evidence. Carefully read Jib Fowles’s “Fifteen Basic Appeals,” identifying which appeals appear in your ad. Carefully watch and take notes on Jean Kilbourne’s “The Dangerous Ways Ads See Women,” identifying which parts of her theory appear in your ad. Do the same with Annie Leonard’s “Story of Stuff.” Find the evidence in your ad that suggests it participates in the ideas the theories discuss. Read and take notes on the student sample essays as models for your own. Pay close attention to how they move from evidence to analysis, how they apply theory, and how they propose consequences. Using your ad, the VTA, Fowles’s list of appeals, Kilbourne’s and/or Leonard’s theories, and your classmates’ ideas, create an ad analysis that examines how your ad influences people. Establish connections between what the ad portrays and the appeals it makes to the reader/viewer. Each appeal carries in it assumptions about what we are supposed to believe and how we are supposed to act. Assuming that ads are effective (and we know they are extremely effective or companies could not afford to pay for them), explain all of the messages the ad sends and the goals in doing so. The draft should fully explain who the theorists are, how the theories work, apply those theories to your ad, offer plenty of visual text details as evidence, uncover and pinpoint the damaging messages the ad sends to its audience, and consider the possible psychological and social consequences of people believing ads like it.