Overall I think this was a really fun and interesting first project to do in this class. I found it really interesting to see how everyone interpreted the assignment differently and we all did pretty different things. It really made me question what associations I had with products even with language removed (identifying Old Spice comes to mind). I thought it was fun to see how easily we understood most ads, even when they weren’t as obvious and it made me reflect on how ingrained ads are in my human experience. I would say that I would change a couple things if we were to do it again. Firstly, no AI image generation, I can’t draw at all and I still had fun actually making my ads, and this really takes away a key aspect of the assignment which is making the darn things yourself. Secondly, I would remove the guessing correctly aspect as part of the grade because frankly some of them were too obvious (looking at you Minecraft and Coke Zero) and I think that issue could be solved if people worried less about getting people to guess it right. For my ads, I did a simple Rubiks Cube one that was not really inspired by anything, and a New Coke ad that I tried to recreate from one of the contemporary ones. Those are posted below as well as a citation for the article I took the New Coke ad from.
“New Coke pops… 34 years later,” AdAge, effective May 25, 2019, https://adage.com/article/classic-ad-review/new-coke-pops-34-years-later/2174086.