“Just do it,” says the cushioned voice in your head, and before you know it, you are already giving your credit card at Nike’s store to purchase a pair of nice running shoes. How could it happen? You were saving money for a laptop and suddenly you buy running shoes. The worst thing is that you do not even know whether you ever run, unless for to the laptop sale, of course.
The point we are trying to drive home is that something can influence you so much that you can find needs that haven’t existed before. This “something” is advertising. Our article is for students that are studying at advertising departments or just took an advertising course this year. We are going to discuss topics on an advertising essay and tips that will help you to cope with the task.
Two Types of Essays
When you study advertising, you are often assigned with diverse projects and presentations. You often need to complete some creative work. However, studying of this subject also demands a scholarly approach. What this means is that studying at an advertising department is more than just creating adverts of all types.
Before proceeding with the creative process, you also need to learn how to analyze ads and how to make your own strategy according to analytical data. So, as you probably understood, there are two types of essays — creative and analytical. Let’s talk more about each.
Analytical Essay on Advertisement
When we talk about analyzing adverts, we don’t mean only particular commercials. Actually you can analyze more complex things, such as:
- Effectiveness of an advertising campaign.
- Advertising strategy of a certain company.
- Popular advertising strategies in a specific industry.
- Style of advertising of a particular advertising agency.
- Worldwide advertising tendencies in the defined period of time.
- Predictions about the future of advertising on the whole.
The listed points are not actually topics. They are rather directions of what can be discussed in analytical essays. Even if you change general names for specific, you will still need to add more details so that you’ll get a narrow essay topic. However, we’ll talk about this later. Now, let’s move to another type of essay.
Creative Essay on Advertisement
Writing creative essays is a bit more difficult than writing analytical. Before completing a creative essay, you still need to analyze and then use this data to create something yourself. What exactly can you write about?
- Complete an advertising strategy for a start-up business.
- Suggest a new advertising strategy for a company that is on the verge of bankruptcy.
- Create samples of advertising copy for a certain campaign.
- Describe audio and video adverts that you are not able to create.
- Plan an advertising campaign for a certain company.
As well as in the previous section, here we provided only with general directions of topics. We just wanted you to understand the difference between the two big types of an advertising essay. The next step is to learn how to get specific topics out of general directions.
How to Get a Narrow Topic
We are going to explain to you how to make your topic narrow on the example. Let’s take one of the directions from the first list — “Effectiveness of an advertising campaign.” Here are the instructions:
1.Specify the advertising campaign. You need to tell the name of an advertising campaign, the company which conducted this campaign, and the time period of it.
Example: “Effectiveness of an advertising campaign” transforms to “Effectiveness of Dove’s “Campaign for Real Beauty.”
2. Explain what you mean by “effectiveness.” Effectiveness is the result of a certain campaign. The result can be positive or negative. The effectiveness is counted by several criteria. However, the first criterion that testifies success of an advertising campaign is sale uplift.
Example: “Campaign for Real Beauty” caused record uplift of Unilever’s sale.
3. Make it sound like a topic, not a thesis statement. When you specify all the nouns, you can get something that is similar to a main idea or thesis statement. Your task is to change the way so that it sounds like a topic.
Example: The reasons for record uplift of Unilever’s sale after “Campaign for Real Beauty.”
If you would like to make the topic narrow, you should add more details to the topic like we do in our example. This is the main principle of making narrow topics out of wide.
Tips on How to Write an Analytical Advertising Essay
- Choose the company whose product you use. It will be easier for you to write about the product if you are a customer of the particular company. This means that you are probably a representative of their target audience. You can analyze the influence of a campaign or a certain advert on you. You can understand what exactly encourages you to purchase a product of this company.
- Mention psychological, political, economic and social factors. When you are talking about factors that make certain advertisements successful or the contrary, you should analyze the situation from different sides. We recommend that you define psychological, political, economic and social factors that influenced the campaign.
- Compare companies that are equal. If you would like to compare the advertising of competitive companies, you should take companies that are of the same size. For example, you shouldn’t compare The Coca-Cola Company with a small local fabricator of soda. It’s better to compare it with PepsiCo.
- Specify the classification that you use if you classify something in your essay. Scholars divide advertising into many types and different scholars offers different classifications. The same thing applies to advertising strategies, technics and tools. If you are talking about specific types of these things, you need to mention the classification according to which you classify a certain thing that way.
- Don’t focus on the quality of the product or service. While writing an essay, don’t forget that your aim is to analyze the quality of advertising. You shouldn’t analyze the quality of a product itself. The only case when you can do this is when you would like to underline that the advertising of a certain company is deceptive and you can prove it by the results of independent research.
Tips on How to Write a Creative Essay
- Analyze the market thoroughly. As we already mentioned, before writing this type of an essay, you need to analyze the market. What does it mean exactly? You need to gather information about your potential competition. How do they advertise this product? What makes them successful? What are today’s trends? What is the demand on the product that you are going to advertise? Answer all these questions and some more to analyze the market.
- Find focus groups to test your advertising. A focus group is a group of people that are representatives of your target audience. Due to focus groups you can understand whether your campaign will be successful or not. However, success in focus groups doesn’t guarantee 100% success under real-life conditions. There are many factors that can spoil the result of research.
- Choose the product which targets an audience you know well. It will be difficult for you to create an advertisement for people whose habitual patterns, personal motives and ambitions are not familiar to you. For example, if you are a person from a middle class family, it will be a challenge to advertise a luxury car. However, after you gaining a certain degree, you will need to advertise various products.
- Don’t confuse the aim and tasks. Typically, when you are writing about a campaign, you need to specify the aim of this campaign. It can be increasing customers’ loyalty, sale uplift up to 30%, growth in the quantity of returning customers and others. Tasks are actually activities that you need to do to reach the aim. Tasks can absolutely be different, from choosing the design of a logo to creating a series of five video commercials.
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