Communication Strand Simulation (Advertising Agency)

Submitted by: Whitney Nexsen, Kristina Nero
Collaborators: Whitney Nexsen, Kristina Nero
School: Short Pump Middle School

Summary

Everyday working professionals develop innovative, authentic, and original ideas and products. In the 21st century, creators of these products have many choices when it comes to deciding which resources to use to bring their ideas and products to life. Over the course of two class periods, we covered the essentials of persuasive techniques while examining these techniques by watching and grading professionally-produced advertisements for magazines, radio stations, and television. After the students had mastered the basic concepts of persuasive writing and the importance of oral, visual, and written language that is essential to advertising, the focus for this part of the unit was for students to take an active role as producers of their choice of persuasive artifacts (magazine ads, radio commercials, or television commercials), choosing the resource (MovieMaker, GoAnimate, Adobe Premier, Audacity, iTunes, OneNote, Word, Publisher, etc.) that their team felt was the most effective for producing the artifact they chose to create. Each class would have a ‘simulated advertising agency environment’ to design products and create advertisements for them. Not only did we advertise the products and score those advertising artifacts in class, we had advertising, sales, and marketing professionals from our local community visit Short Pump Middle School to critique and give advice to the agencies.

TIPC Ratings

IDEAL/TARGET: Students select appropriate digital tools, evaluate, and utilize information; apply varied research skills to find and evaluate resources; use information and resources to accomplish real-world tasks. The real-world tasks include: synthesizing information, deciphering how to portray persuasive techniques, using resources to create authentic artifacts (magazine ad, radio commercial, tv commercials). The resources were print (magazines, newspapers, photography) and non-print resources (Xtranormal, GoAnimate, MovieMaker, PowerPoint, Google Images, Sounds Effects, etc.). Students use feedback from peers and teachers to improve advertisements before presenting to advertising, sales, and marketing professionals.

IDEAL/TARGET: Students communicate and collaborate with peers; form collaborative teams to solve real-world problems (Media literacy, collaboration and create original works). Students make commercials/advertisements to sell products to chosen audience. Many students help other groups with technical issues as they arise, and teams earn money based on how they help others (software technician, acting assistance, production/camera assistance, etc.). Students communicate within their team and with the class as a whole as they present and receive feedback in real (whole-class discussion) and non-real time (Googledocs feedback forms/surveys). Students effectively communicate beyond the classroom by inviting advertising, sales, and marketing professionals from the local community to interact and provide feedback. (These experts have been invited in and will review the presentations with the students at a later date.)

IDEAL/TARGET: Students are required to apply critical thinking skills as they make decisions about which resources they should use to plan, design, and create the commercials to be shared with their chosen audience. Students create a business plan that asks individuals within a team to work independently and then come together to mesh all ideas to create the most effective ad. During the presentation stage of the lesson, all students are asked to think critically about each team’s production both with a rubric and through open-ended whole-class discussion. Students built confidence in explaining to the class why they made the creative choices they did, and the class in-turn is able to make suggestions for how to improve each team’s product advertisement. The comments are available for students to reference as they make final changes before presenting to local advertising, sales, and marketing professionals.

Within each class, many original commercials are created by diverse individuals with different opinions and personalities. Yet within each team, these students work together from the brainstorm stage to the final publishing stage by applying communication skills, design/layout skills, editing/revision skills, and technology skills (bringing all elements of the design together into one final product). Students make creative decisions as far as which product to advertise, how to apply the persuasive techniques effectively, and how to work together to accomplish an authentic, real-world goal. In addition to a numerical grade, students also earn money depending on how they helped other groups produce their advertisements and the actual grade the team received for the work they did (grade=certain amount of money). Among some of the ways students help each other include : students providing technical support for many different programs, acting as cameraman/photographer, or offering their acting skills to help other groups. These opportunities for helping others while earning money add to the simulated real-world feel of this lesson