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ENG 1001 Home Page Essay 2

ESSAY 2: ADVERTISEMENT ANALYSIS

In preparing to write this essay, examine the online advertisements below. You'll choose one of them to be the topic of your essay:

Your writing tasks for this essay are as follows:

Your purpose in writing this essay is to convince your reader that your evaluation of the advertisement's effectiveness is accurate. You can assume your reader has seen the advertisement, but has not examined it closely or considered the issue of audience.

1. Evaluate How Effectively the Advertisement Communicates Its Central Message to the Target Market

Effective advertisements are targeted. That is, the advertisers have some specific segment of the population in mind to whom they wish to sell the product being advertised, and it is that group of consumers for whom they design the advertisement: the text, visual and audio components, links, and so forth. Specifically, the advertisers are attempting to communicate through the advertisement a central message about their product that will convince the target market to buy the product.

Carefully examining the details in an advertisement should allow you to identify the target market and the central message. An even closer examination of the advertisement and its design should allow you to evaluate how well the advertisement communicates the message to the target market.

Your first tasks, then, are to identify the target market and the central message, to assess the advertisement's effectiveness, and to write a one-sentence thesis statement that summarizes these points.

2. Write a Short Description of the Advertisement

Your description should be no more than one full paragraph long. In your description, include just enough detail about the advertisement to provide a reader with its most important features. Note that you are not required to include every detail from the advertisement.

3. Support Your Evaluation of the Advertisement's Effectiveness with a Careful Analysis of the Advertisement Itself

Remember that to analyze means to break something down into its parts. With that definition in mind, spend the remainder of the body of your essay explaining features of the advertisement that support your identification of the target market and message and your evaluation of the ad's effectiveness. In other words, provide evidence for your thesis statement.

Your analysis should include at least one paragraph for each of the following:

• Target market: This paragraph should provide evidence for the target market you claim the advertisement is trying to reach. In other words, how do you know what the target market is? What is the proof from the advertisement itself?
   

• Central message: This paragraph should provide evidence for the central message you claim the advertisement is trying to send to the target market. Put another way, how do you know the advertisement is trying to send the message you say it is? Again, what is the proof?
   

• Effectiveness of the advertisement: This paragraph should provide evidence for what you claim about the advertisement's effectiveness. In other words, what makes the advertisement effective (or not) in convincing the target market that the central message is true? NOTE: You may have more than one paragraph for this part of your essay.

Your evidence in these paragraphs should come from the advertisement itself, but your goal is not simply to describe the advertisement again. Instead, you need to offer specific, relevant details and explain their significance to your reader.

Other Considerations

Be sure to include an effective introduction (including a thesis statement) and conclusion, to develop your ideas into carefully constructed paragraphs, and to employ correct and effective sentence structure, style, grammar, and mechanics.

In terms of style, you should use a formal style: avoid first-person pronouns (such as “I”), second-person pronouns (such as “you”), and slang.

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