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I have always loved adbusters, I find the whole magazine hilarious, so right from the start I was stoked about this essay topic. I did have a hard time choosing an actual topic though, but I just thought about it until I came across something I could rant about for six or seven pages and went with that. Looking at adbusters.com, I knew my anti-ad would not turn out as good as theirs are. It was easy to come up with an idea, it was just a very strange process carrying it out. Originally I was going to write about gas and have my anti ad be a pile of trash with a Shell sign above it, but rip the S off and just have it say “hell”. When I went to go about designing the pile of rubbage the entire thing just looked really awkward and so I decided to change my topic to cell phones, thinking maybe I would come up with an idea for an anti ad that would flow better. Over all I am not too ashamed of how my project turned out, I think that a lot of people in class had better ideas than I did. I’m just afraid I went a little off topic and I might get some points knocked off for that. My essay isn’t completely about advertising as much as people’s attachments to their phones. In the end I think the most exciting part was coming up with the idea, just because I got somewhat angry about it. Yes, the anti-ad was harder to create than I expected, just because I wanted it to be perfect and I’m really not that good at photoshop, which is actually quite pathetic since I am an art major. I am just stubborn and like to do everything by hand, I hate all this computer generated art that is getting out there these days, and I find it hard to produce things that way instead of knowing how every piece fits together. What can I say I’m just really stubborn.

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I have to say that this was one of my favorite assignments. Although it took a little while to get everything together and try and find which ad to spoof, it turned out to be a really fun paper. It allowed me to go back and look at many different ads that ae out there today and i got to see what type of images that certain companies and people use to try and get there messages across. I think that when it all comes down to it, images are the most imprtant thing to have to get a message across and do it without having to make the viewer think to much. My way of understanding ads has always been trying to figure out what the picture or the image is trying to say. After i figure that out i usually am able to understand the whole meaning behind the ad. Sometimes there are ads that make people confused because they send a couple different messages and that is when words come in handy. When i found my ad which was the cheeseburger shoe, i thought that it was great because of the messages that were shown through the picture of the shoe. also it was awesome because these two things, the cheeseburger and the Nike shoe, happen to be two of my most favorite things in the world. In the end, i learned a lot from this paper because i learned how to inturrperet ads and how to read and understand all the messages that are trying to be shown. also it opened up my eyes and made me realise that you have to go much more in depth to understand certain images and find what the real meaning is. This is also why i liked this paper topic so much.

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I really enjoyed writing this paper and spoofing the ads, although it was hard for me to come up with a topic at first. At first I thought about doing a Nike ad but two others were already doing it and I wanted to get away from sports related topics, which I had written a lot about in my previous two papers. I decided to go with fashion and accessories as a lot of the advertisements we are exposed to are promoting these products and everyone is aware of them. I also wanted to use advertisements that portrayed the minority of society and how these images can affect a viewer. For example, most fashion commercials have models or celebrities wearing the clothes which can give a viewer a false sense of belief that they too will look that good in these clothes. I learned a lot about advertising through this paper, mainly how the use of imagery and text can persuade an audiences opinions. Also, which material is used and which is left out to make the product look as appealing as possible. Although there are many negative aspects to fashion, only the good things are portrayed in advertisements. I really enjoyed creating my anti-ad, even though I was a bit skeptical about it at first. Once I knew what I wanted to do I used photoshop to put all the images together. I especially like my anti-ad on Paris Hilton’s perfume “Can Can”. It was quite entertaining looking through all of the pictures of her on the internet looking very rough until I found the one I needed! In all I thought this was a great assignment. It allowed me to think outside the box and construct something I have never thought about before. It also opened my eyes as to how the advertising world works, even though I already knew! It made me realize how manipulative images can be and how persuasive we can be!

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This particular paper was exciting for me. It gave me the chance to utilize some creativity outside of my writing. I got to use my favorite advertisements to do the anti-advertisements. After looking at the adbusters site I really got some good examples to do my ad. I felt confident in creating my own anti-advertisement. When I was choosing between ads to spoof, I had a couple in my mind. I was going to do a spoof on Charmin, the toilet paper brand. Then I decided that I could get more information from the other advertisement that I chose. After I chose Nike advertisements and slogan; I had to come up with a good anti-ad. I decided to have one of those pictures of someone doing something athletic but in a different scenario from the sport ones Nike generally uses. I made it so the girl was doing a kegstand! This was sort of an issue because I wasn't sure if this would be the right kind of spoof, but in the end it worked. I put on her shirt the Nike logo and put the slogan "Just Dot It". What is even better is the fact that the girl was sweating so it made the ad look even more detailed. It related to the original Nike ad that I spoofed even more. I enjoyed creating it way more than I did deciding my idea. I think that the artistic aspect is way more intriguing. I actually thought it was hard at first. When I first found out what our assignment was in class I was pretty nervous. Then, after awhile, all these ideas started to come through my mind and I wasn't worried about it. Overall I enjoyed the anti-ad in the end. I think it puts a good spin on the class helping us understand advertising and making the class more interesting.

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I actually found it very difficult to think of an ad to spoof on. This was mostly a problem because of the paper we had to write. If there was no paper then I would have been free to think of a good ad to spoof and to make an appropriate anti-ad. Instead I was stuck with the mentality of "what ad can I pick that will enable me to write seven pages on?" In the end I picked Geico commercials and just went with it. I actually got a good angle and am very proud of my work but I was still unable to write the full length. I found it very difficult. Once I got the idea it was fun to think of how to make an anti-ad but it was also still very difficult. In the end I got the idea to pick a specific Geico commercial and reverse it. I picked the commercial where a celebrity translates for a regular Geico custumer. In my paper I commented on how insulting this was and how it implied that Geico's customers were "simple people". So as my anti-ad I made a celebrity a Geico customer and had a regular person translate for them. I picked Rocky Balboa the fiction chatacter from Rocky played by Silvester Steloan to be the celebrity. My brother and his girlfriend helped me by providing the voices of the anouncer and the regular person respectively. I did the voice of Rocky and we recorded a skit where we played the commercial on audio. I could not do the visual but for that I provided a pictures of Rockey and the regular person.

Creating this anti ad was a completely different experience. I have never been told to use visuals to express my written beliefs. After thinking about what I wanted to write my paper on, coming up with a concept for the anti ad was the hardest part. Creating an anti-anti-smoking advertisement is tricky. I did not want to promote smoking, just to express how I felt about Truth advertisements. Initially, my anti-ads looked more like truth ads themselves. It took me days to figure out how to create something that was against Truth advertisements. I approached a friend about it and her advice was to, “Just say it.” I was going about the creation of an anti- ad hoping to use fewer words, to not need word, but for the purpose of my anti-ad, I had to stray from my original idea.
I did not want to seem against the idea of truth advertisements; I just wanted to express their lack of efficiency. I wanted to explain why they did not work. After playing around with actual truth advertisements I came up with me answer. Because I had seen so many Truth advertisements it was hard for me to create something not in those terms. The first few anti-ads I made looked like they could have all been Truth ads.
Once I had my idea I really enjoyed creating my anti-ad. Photoshop was a bit tricky because I had never used it before. I had to play around a lot before I could understand exactly what I was doing. It took a lot of trial and error and there were some things said to the computer that I did not necessarily mean, but in the end photoshop and I settled our differences to create something beautiful.

In the beginning, I really was a little hesitant at creating this anti-ad. I thought it would kind of be a pointless assignment and that there was not much to learn from it. I found out later I was way wrong. I learned a lot from this assignment and I am glad I did it. When I started writing the paper I had a lot of trouble coming up with one solid idea to write about. I kept coming up with stupid ideas that wouldn’t really fit what I felt I wanted to write about. Eventually I found a wide and general purpose of advertisements that I thought would fit my writing capabilities perfectly. When I actually started writing the paper, I ran into more trouble coming up with an anti-ad. I had no idea how or what to use as an ad, so it was definitely a struggle. I actually didn’t come up with a good idea until after I finished writing a large part of my paper. After looking at the web site I felt like I had a better idea of what I needed to do to make my ad. I found out that I needed to use all the same things that regular ads use to create a successful anti-ad. I was considering doing an anti-ad on the E-Trade commercials, but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it because those commercials are just so funny! Then I thought I might do something with the Charmon toilet paper commercials because I just thought the fact of a bear using toilet paper is absurd. In the end I decided to bash McDonald’s. I definitely enjoyed thinking of the idea of an anti-ad more than making one because as I made it I felt that it wasn’t as good as the idea that I had set in my head. Creating the anti-ad was about as hard as I thought that it would be.

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Well, I did struggle with writing the paper for the most part. Starting from the beginning, I had numerous ideas in my ahead. However, there was something about this topic that absolutely stumped me. For some reason, I had an extremely difficult time actually putting my ideas on paper and allowing them to make any logical sense…As for the actual Anti-Ad itself, I really loved creating it. I have never created any digital image such as this Anti-Ad. I was forced to jump out of my comfort zone and try something new – which I truly admire. Learning new skills is an essential part of living our everyday lives. This was a completely new program that I was working with in making my Anti-Ad. As well as actually making the Anti-Ad, I was forced to be creative. In an everyday instance, I am able to be creative – but with music, not digital art. It took me a great deal of time to figure out a truly original idea. But it was definitely worth the effort, in my opinion…After visiting the adbusters.org website, I was incredibly excited to start my own. I will admit, it was at times difficult to think of an original idea. However, as I said before, it is new knowledge that I now appreciate having. Honestly, I instantly thought of the Anti-Ad for cigarettes and figured that it personally fit me well to write about. Originally, I just assumed that this assignment was going to be simpler than it really was. While I was in class, I seemed to understand how I was going to approach this assignment. However, once I was at home, my mind essentially went blank…As for enjoying this project, I definitely did. I honestly enjoyed creating the Anti-Ad more than thinking of the idea.

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Okay so my experience with paper 3. I felt really prepared to write this paper actually I felt that everything that I was going to write about was extremely similar to paper 2. Because in paper 2 we discussed image and text relationship, paper 3 seemed as though it would go rather smoothly. Paper 3 was easier in a way. I couldn’t think of one advertisement to write about so that made things a little stressful but I’m fairly happy with the outcome. There are some things I can tweak just like in every other paper. In creating the actual anti-ad looking at ad busters helped a lot. Really though I had more fun thinking of anti-ads instead of actually creating one. Making the ad really frustrated me. I went to Strozier to the multi-media lab and hoped onto photoshop but I couldn’t figure anything out so I ended up creating mine off power point. So,  yeah it was an experience. I don’t know if it was hard to make an anti-ad I just felt limited in my resources. It was to my understanding that if you could make one from scratch that it would be preferred but I always recognized anti-ads by the use of the same or similar picture and different text. I don’t know. It’s like the picture Ms. O’Malley used in her blog post. It was a cartoon but it looked exactly as the commercial but was manipulated to portray a point. I felt as though I couldn’t have replicated anything like that. I also felt a little disappointed for using some of the text off the original ad. I just hope it is what was expected. Another advertisement I considered spoffing instead of the Heineken beer was the Disney Channel. They’re so fake over there it’s ridiculous how many break out “stars” come from there and they aren’t even great at what they do. Whatev. Okay that’s my final rant… I mean blog for the semester. Later.

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When this anti-ad was first assigned to us, I did not think I would be able to create an anti-ad that was as creative as the ones I had looked at on the adbusters.org site and the ones we looked at in class.  To my own surprise, I found that I really enjoyed writing on this topic.  I guess since I had never really taken apart the different aspects of advertisements, I never truly realized the methods that advertisers constantly use to manipulate the viewer’s perspective on the product.  After looking through other anti-ads, I found that the most effective anti-ads, at least for me, were the simplest ads.  These anti-ads caught my attention right away.  I used this method when I went to spoof and create my own anti-ad.  Since creativity is not necessarily my strength, I would say creating the anti-ad was more difficult for me than writing the actual paper.  I really enjoyed analyzing each advertisement that I wrote about, because it made me recognize these advertising strategies that I see, firsthand, in my everyday life.  Writing this paper allowed me to notice other deceiving aspects in ads that are constantly thrown at me everyday through television, magazines, billboards, etc.   When I was brainstorming ideas and the specific advertisement that I wanted to spoof, I decided that I wanted to use an advertisement that is targeted specifically for my age group, young adults and teens.  This way I could include my own personal reaction to the advertisement.  At first, I thought about spoofing make-up, hair, teeth whitening, or acne-clearing products, because as a teenage girl, these ads are strongly targeted towards our audience.  These ads are a part of the constant pressure for women to enhance their physical appearance and “look good.”  After looking through alcohol advertisements, I found there were many deceiving aspects that I found interesting, so I chose to spoof a Corona ad.