So many ads. So little time.

This is the story of how my paper came to be. I had a really hard time figuring out what I wanted to write my paper about. The things that I was interested in didn't seem like they could be worked into a full-sized paper. It wasn't until we had to do our curating assignment that I really started to figure out that I wanted to write about awe in advertising. I started to notice a pattern in my gathering. I was drawn to the videos that were about humans. Basic human truths. Some of the things I picked up for that assignment were advertisements. At that point, I decided to see what I could do with ads.

I started researching and reading up on advertising. I went to Professor McKinlay in the communications department to ask him about my idea. Honestly, I didn't know very much about advertising, and so most of my work in the beginning was getting a handle on the subject. At that point, I gave my first creative prototype to the class in the form of a Powerpoint presentation.

My ideas continued to evolve with input from my classmates and Dr. Burton. I think it was +Amber who gave me the idea to look at spectacle and the making of awe in movies by recommending this TED talk to me. And +Shelly introduced me to the type of commercials that elicit awe through shocking images like the meth commercials. +Amber's post on propaganda helped me move into historical examples of eliciting awe from an audience, and Dr. Burton lent me a few books about the subject of propaganda and persusasion.

At that point I researched, wrote, and watched far too many hours of commercials trying to find the right ones for my paper. It was harder than I thought to find ads that fit within the categories I'd set up for myself. For instance, the length of commercials I was looking at originally were too long for most television spots. Maybe they were made for online-only viewing. But I picked a few that I thought worked well enough for a paper. And finding my venue really helped me move forward to the point where I could put out a finished product.

My creative project is still coming together, but it will be done by Saturday. I will probably just show those four ads that I used in my paper and the clips of me explaining some things via a youtube playlist.

It's been a great experience reaching outside of my comfort zone in this paper. I learned a lot about a subject that I probably would never have looked at. More valuable than that has been the experience of working as a team with my classmates as we all critiqued one another's work and made research suggestions. It was a good exercise, and it has been fun to see how everyone's papers and projects have evolved from the beginning of the class.