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Analyizing gendered advertising_

      My journey through this project has been an interesting one.  I first started with a different project where I was going to be taking a meditation course and writing about learning a new skill, through journaling and studying the practice. However, after getting about 3 weeks into the course I found myself bored with the topic, not because it was boring, but what I was writing about was boring. I felt as though I was continuously writing about the same thing for every journal.  So, in October I took on the daunting task for any student, changing topics for projects.  When trying to determine projects I was also deep into my search for a job, which is what brought me to thinking about advertising.  I had been talking about gendered language in one of my other course and remember talking earlier in the semester in casual conversation in class about gendered advertisements, so I decided that could be a topic I could further explore.  The thing was I did not know anything really about advertising.  So I started by researching what went into developing an advertising campaign and looked at different types of examples.  I read the book  “Food is love: Advertising and Gender Roles in America”, which gave me a good idea of what advertising was like and how it shaped consumerism and reinforced stereotypes in the America.  

      I came up with the idea of writing about the research behind I had done about gendered advertising and then using that research analyze two advertisements, ending with a concept board of an advertisement of my own.  My project has since my original conception of it transformed, mostly in due in part to losing it because of a virus on my computer that required me to clear the hard drive.  The weekend before Thanksgiving I lost the work I had done on my original project and had to start basically from scratch!  This was a scary moment for me. I met with my mentor for the project, T, who helped me chill out a little and helped me restructure the project to its current form with analysis in the of the advertisements in the form of voice recording on the videos.  This helped to make my project a little more interesting and more multimedia involved, so in the end it was not the worst thing that could have ever happened, but it was a set back for this class and my others.  After deciding to change the way the project was set up, which included changing it to a webpage styled after AdWeek, I had to learn about how to use the different types of media which I was now going to work in.  This involved me learning how to use popcorn maker video editing software, recording equipment, and how to do new things Prezi that I had never tried.  As a tech savvy person this was an enjoyable task but not very easy, mostly because I was unfamiliar with all of these things.   The project has been enjoyable to do and has been interesting to study and learn about, it allowed me to learn about the advertising industry in a way that I most likely would not have considered before.

      As you look through my project I would like you to follow it in the order that it is laid out, starting with the written portion and ending with the final Prezi. As a style choice to make my page look like AdWeek I used the header of the website on my page (does not link to any thing is a dummy header) and used the same fonts that are used on their site, including red for links to other sites and media.  The reasoning for leaving references for a separate link is because I wanted to keep the same kind of feel as the original AdWeek site. To get to my project simply click the picture below. I hope you enjoy my project!

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