Purpose:
Advertisements reflect our cultural ideals and attitudes. As such, they provide a venue through which to analyze our assumptions about who is purchasing what and why. In this assignment, we are focusing particularly on food ads and how aspects of the food ad (including such things as the setting, the language, and the people) speak the advertisement’s target audience as well as the company’s assumptions about that audience.
Skills and Knowledge:
Upon successful completion of this assignment, you will be able to:
Demonstrate an awareness of the different techniques used to appeal to and sell to different audiences
Apply your knowledge of the relationships between food and identity to an analysis of food advertisements
Compare and contrast multiple ads to understand broader strategies of food marketing
Task:
In this assignment, you need to analyze four advertisements for food items. There are two ways you can approach this assignment.
Either you can choose to choose four ads for the same product (e.g. four ads for McDonald’s chicken nuggets)
Or, you can select four ads for different products but contained within the same advertising period (e.g. four ads within the same magazine issue or newspaper, four commercials aired during the same TV episode, four ads during the same podcast episode, four billboards within the same five-mile stretch of highway, etc.)
You cannot mix and match from these strategies. You must select one approach. The ads need to be relatively current meaning that they need to be on the market currently or within the past two years.
For each advertisement, you need to describe the ad and analyze its context, the product it is selling, the content, the target audience, the language used, and the advertising strategies. You will then need to present a comparison of the ads. In your analysis and/or comparison, you need to tie your analysis back to at least three course sources (required lectures, readings, and/or videos). Be sure that any other claims made are also backed by sources.
See Template attached
