1-4 Activity: Four Advertisements
Assignment
Task: Submit to complete this assignment
Select four advertisements to support your work on the projects throughout this course. You can either choose all four from the Advertisement Examples PDF provided or include up to four ads that you find yourself. Guidance for selecting your own ads is included at the end of the Advertisement Examples handout. Your selected ads may be print, video, or radio. Either way, you should choose a total of four ads. If you include your own ads, be sure that they display interactions between people or convey ways that the product or service advertised will impact or influence people.
Your instructor will review your submissions and will ask you to resubmit any ads that do not meet the criteria. You may revise and resubmit your advertisement selection as many times as needed before the end of this module to gain full credit for this assignment.
Enter your four ad selections. If you are choosing ads that are not on the provided list, enter the URL for the ad or for an image that depicts the ad.
This assignment will help you prepare your work for your first major project. You can review the details of this project by accessing the Project 1 Comparison Template Guidelines and Rubric PDF document.
Prompt
To start this assignment, you will gather a set of four advertisements from the provided Advertisement Examples document that features multiple people. You
will then use these advertisements to fill in the provided Comparison Template document, in which you address specific social science aspects of each
advertisement in preparation for your next project, the observation journal.
Specifically, the following critical elements must be addressed and will be graded using the rubric at the end of this document:
I. Question how individuals are represented in the ads. In your template, ask questions about the individuals in the ads that social scientists might ask.
For instance, you might ask why a person in the ad is standing outside the larger group, or why individuals are depicted in certain ways.
II. Question how groups and group behavior are represented in the advertisements. In your template, ask questions about groups/group interactions
that social scientists might ask. For instance, you might ask why the women are grouped together separately from the men, or why the group seems
to have very little diversity.
III. Question how different cultures and cultural identity are represented in the advertisements. In your template, ask questions about the cultures and
cultural identities in the ads that social scientists might ask. For instance, you might ask why people who look to be of the same ethnic background
are wearing similar clothing, or what certain symbols or interactions may mean related to culture.
IV. Notate how the advertisements compare and contrast to each other. For instance, do you see any commonalities or significant differences among
interactions between the ads? What might these commonalities or differences say about human interactions?
V. Pose questions a social scientist might be interested in, based on your observations of the advertisements. For instance, what larger questions about
human interactions might they ask? For this, you may build on your comparisons, concentrate on a theme or trend you noticed throughout the ads,
or develop a follow-up question related to a particularly interesting ad.
