Advertising and Media Research Essay

Advertising and Media Research Essay

This is a typical argumentative essay of approximately 1500-2000 words. This is a research essay that critically engages with current issues related to advertising and media and the concepts discussed in this course. For this paper I’m asking you to develop a case study that will help you illustrate a specific topic and argument. Your case study could be a specific advertising campaign, reaction to a campaign, corporation and their practices, etc. Your essay will draw on at least one of the concepts from one of the weeks of this course such as:
Free labour; consumer society; audience commodity; gender and advertising; branding; national brands; masculinity and advertising; consumer citizenship; race and advertising; youth and advertising; green advertising; culture jamming; advertising and the environment; self-branding; advertising and democracy; neoliberalism and advertising; product placement; paratext as advertising; advertising and social responsibility; native advertising

More specific information regarding this assignment will be discussed in lecture and provided as we get closer to the due date.

Ways to think about a case study paper:
Consider your overall argument first, then your case study as a way to explore that argument.
In the below, you can see the overall argument; the case study; and the theoretical concepts.
if you wanted to talk about the role of some blockbuster franchises as massive advertising campaigns, for example, you could use a franchise like Transformers and then you could discuss it in terms of the audience commodity and probably bring in product placement to discuss the ways the films are made to sell toys and vehicles – essentially using nostalgia and explosion content to sell an audience to advertisers.

NOTE: You will always find material in the library related to the theoretical approaches in the assignment, though you may not find material directly related to your case study. For this reason, it’s very important to have a good idea of what your overall argument is about without the case study. Start by researching your theoretical concepts in relation to your overall argument so: blockbuster franchises, audience commodity, product placement, etc. and then you can search for articles about your case study to see if there are any connected to your particular argument.

Just a quick note about using databases rather than using the general library search: this will be VERY useful for those of you who are researching topics that cross over to topics studied in other fields, but with a completely different perspective. If, for example, you are writing a paper on audience research and you do a general search, you are just as likely to find papers written by business scholars writing from an industry perspective as papers written critically by media studies scholars. This is very important with a topic like audience research in particular, because the two fields have very different perspectives on the topic and very different ways of studying it. You need to be sure that you are applying theoretical concepts and methodologies appropriate to the field of study (this is true if you are doing research for a class in a different department!).