Zara Yaffe – Advertisement Evaluation

Evaluation (in relation to theory)

In my theory work, I came up with a mind-map full of ideas to do for an advertisement. This was time consuming as obviously there are hundreds of products I could have chosen to create an advertisement for. Through the process of elimination, I finally chose to pick a hair product advert. I think I relate most to hair product type adverts because many of the others were for things that I do not have control of, i.e. cat food, mental health awareness and a variety of different disabilities. I don’t have control of these things as I am not the one in my family that chooses what cat food we buy, and I do not have enough experience with people dealing with mental health issues or disabilities. I am the person who chooses which hair product I use and that is, therefore, the reason I chose to pick this one.

My questionnaire showed me a variety of things that I needed to know in order to create my advert. It told me which hair product people I asked use most, whether they use shampoo and conditioner or just one, and do they buy their hair product just due to the scent. I chose to ask these questions as these indicated to me what I should or shouldn’t include in the advertisement I would be producing afterwards. I mainly needed to ask open questions that didn’t just have a ‘yes or no’ answer so that I could get detail out of the answers I received. I didn’t want to create an advert that would not be realistic, I wanted it to be as professional as possible and therefore I had to get as much detail from my questionnaire as possible. This influenced my idea in the sense that I chose to do Head and Shoulders shampoo and conditioner as this was one of the most popular brands out of my questionnaire results. I also asked whether people do buy a product just due to the scent. The fact that more people said no than yes meant that I didn’t necessarily have to include this in my advert and so I did not.

Head and Shoulders is a hair care product that is known as an anti-dandruff shampoo. Due to this, and with my research, I decided to use a promise of benefit technique. In my advertisement, my actress told the viewers that they could be up to 100% flake free too, as my actress was. This is a way of selling a product that would encourage the viewer to buy it, as they don’t really see any reason not to. The viewer will not know whether the company is actually telling the truth or not, in relation to these statistics, and so they just believe it. A viewer would like to believe that a company would research what they’re selling and so a potential buyer would believe whatever they say.

I think that my advertisement is realistic and follows the order of a typical hair care product advertisement. The actress complains in the advert and then she has a resolution and is trying to sell it. This is how typical hair product adverts flow. The advert I made was a stand-alone advert. Through my research, I learnt that this means that the company will have ma my different adverts all out that are all different at one time. The characters in the adverts do not have a storyline.