Potential Ideas for Practical

Given that my main focus for my cop essay was the design of advertisements and how they're always trying to sell you a product or a way of life and do so in their deceiving ways. Within my practical work I want to try and go against the grain and produce something that differs for the typical advertisement, trying to turn advertising on it's head. 

With that in mind my first idea was to advertise positive ideologies and thoughts. As opposed to advertising a product, it would promote spending more time with your family and friends or appreciating what you already have and not having this need to consume more to feel happier. Overall the idea would be to focus more on your spiritual values in the hope to promote genuine happiness and better well being, not just materialistic well being.

A second idea was to take current in your face, obnoxious ads and to deface them. By that I mean to replace the bullsh*t message they're trying to promote and replace it with the truth, they're after your money and care nothing for your actual well-being like they may come across as. Something else I thought I could add onto this is a little satirical message such as a list of side effects on the bottom of the ad. For example on a product advertisement, they often claim it positively affect you in some way if you buy it but instead have something along the lines of *may affect your overall happiness and well being. *may contribute to feeding your materialistic desires. etc etc.

Often with products such as cosmetics or even supplements they promote an unrealistic body image for both men and women, more often women but nonetheless this can have a detrimental affect on people's self worth. The Protein World ad below is a good example of what I mean by this and so another idea I had would be to maybe shame the designers in some way and have them as the face of the advertisements. Because it's all well and good the designers sitting in their office not even considering the effects creating something like this has on people but it forces them to think badly about their own body and ultimately feel pressured into buying these products that will help them appear as good as the model. Maybe if the model was a slightly less out of shape, less model-like designer, they would think twice about promoting products in such a way.

One of my ideas that I feel the strongest about so far is this concept of having 'consumer pounds'. By this I mean creating a currency system that exaggerates people's focus on consuming. Aside from paying the bills and buying food, the rest of our money often goes towards materialistic things such as clothes, cosmetics, technology etc. Everything we see pushes the idea of consuming onto us and embedded deep within our minds and so because of that it's become an integral part of our lives. So by creating a currency based solely around consuming it would mock this in some way, but also put emphasis on the face that we consume too much simply just to keep ourselves happy.

With a lot of advertisements food ones especially, the product is manipulated in some way to make it appear better than how it does in real life, whether that be airbrushed, photoshopped etc. For example the McDonalds burger below (real life vs as advertised).



So my idea for this is to create an honest and straight up ad for a product, that takes away all of the manipulations and trickery to the picture of the product but also to couple it with a real message of what the product will do for you as opposed to what the advertisers lie to you about what it will do. Following on from this an example of this I thought could be to create a realistic aftershave/perfume ad but without the celebrity, often what pulls people to a particular aftershave is the celebrity that endorses it. They think that if they buy this one e.g. Chanel No 5 below they'll be closer to their celebrity idol or being like them.