The Task and Workshop

Advertising and the Media are often blamed for encouraging excessive consumerism, distorting our cultural values, commercialising and sexualising childhood, making us feel inadequate and insecure about ourselves, encouraging us to be unhealthy, encouraging us to get into debt as well as encouraging stereotypes and certain types of behaviour.

This week we want you to find an example of a piece of media, an advert, a company or organisation, a type of product, a celebrity or a country that you believe is being irresponsible in what it is promoting. This could be one of the above issues or from the ideas you explored in the first week.

You should then produce a case study about the example you have chosen that answers the following questions:

• Who or what is it?
• What is the problem or issue? How much impact does it have?
• What is the solution to the problem? (is it a change in the law, is it getting the company to do something, or is it a much bigger issue?
• How would the company or organisation defend their position?
• Have other creative practitioners dealt with this issue? If so how?
• How could you, as a media practitioner, go about using your skills to highlight the issue to others- or to bring it to the attention of people who can resolve the issue?

You should then produce a pitch for a creative campaign that you believe will be effective at bringing this issue to people’s attention: this can be in any media (poster campaign, sticker campaign, advert, billboard, street performance, online etc etc). You should consider how your idea will create an impact and what the potential consequences are if you carried it out.

Once you have developed this, you should then produce a case study that answers the above questions and sells your creative pitch. This could be either:

a) a written case study and pitch

b) a video case study and pitch

c) an audio case study and pitch

Once you have done this please post to twitter with the #creativact hashtag

Some inspiration

Adbusters Media Foundation: Spoof Ad examples to give you an idea of some of the campaigns people have worked on in the past.