Advertisement Write-Up

Ellis Orozco
Yura Salter
eHarmony
For this project we had to create our own advertisement, which tried to sell a product to a select group of people that the product normally wouldn’t be sold to. As we studied the world of advertising and looked deeper into the way advertisers use various techniques to gain our attention and money, we discovered various ways to approach advertising ranging from making the audience want to be like their favorite NFL star, to satisfying that need to have aesthetic sensations.
Advertising is a game of trying to connect with your audience and leave an impression that makes your audience want more. The trick is being able to do this in the span of thirty seconds, or in the case of magazine advertisers being able to catch the eye of their audience as they flip through the magazine, and make them stop long enough so you can get your message out.
For our advertisement we chose to try to sell eHarmony, a dating website, to teenage geeks who play video games. We wanted to instill this need for sex in the minds of the teens so we chose to use an image of Jessica Alba.” Mainly because everyone knows who she is. When we say “geek” we simply mean someone who is socially awkward or too intimidated by girls to talk to them. Our second technique ties in quite nicely with the need for sex and that is the need for friendship. We wanted to get the message across that if you use eHarmony you could gain a relationship with a model; it was more of “anything is possible so why not try it out?” We also tried to get the message across that by using eHarmony you could achieve success and a sense of accomplishment no matter what you look or act like.
We also created this sense of prominence, or need to be admired and respected. By using eHarmony we were portraying this image that you could gain an incredibly beautiful girlfriend and that everyone will worship you for your achievement. Which leads to satisfying the need of attention by putting the image of Jessica Alba on the advertisement we were indirectly saying that you will gain attention from people near and far. This is also known as a need for autonomy, otherwise known as the need to be the one singled out in a huge group. You want people to envy you due to the pretty girlfriend you got from eHarmony. Our final tactic was trying to satisfy the need for aesthetic sensations, which quite simply means we were trying to appeal to the audience by using beauty (Alba). It is highly effective because people will be flipping through a magazine then they see Jessica Alba and go, “Whoa, it’s Jessica Alba, let’s see what’s going on here.”