It is not uncommon for companies to release a set of advertisements to promote a new product, service, or brand the company wants to promote. The set of advertisements is known as a campaign. All advertisements in a campaign approach the product, service, or brand in a different manner or perspective, but they all use the same set of rules that lets the audience know that the separate ads work together.
An excellent way to determine what the set of rules are is to make your own ad that would fit in the campaign. As you are making your own ad you will notice which aspects can be altered and which aspects need to remain the same in order to maintain the core characteristics of the campaign. Aspects that need to be considered is the image, typography, contrast, color usage, and message.
To demonstrate what I’m talking about, I participated in this exercise too. I made an ad that would be part of what I’m dubbing as the “Know the Signs” Campaign from http://www.suicideprevention.org (website and phone number presented on ads are no longer in service).
(original ad) 
(my ad)
There are differences between the two ads, but most people would assume they are part of the same campaign. I broke down the core characteristics of the original and implemented them into my ad. These characteristics include the usage of image content, color, and contrast.
Image Content
Unfortunately, death by suicide has become increasingly more common and one of the high-risk populations is teenage girls and a common target of suicide prevention programs. The original ad played on this when emphasizing the high rates of suicide. The original ad not only used a well-known at-risk population, but also included a common emotional need for the population when they are experiencing suicidal thoughts. By incorporating the emotional need into the image, the audience experiences an emotional response that makes them want to help teens experiencing suicidal tendencies.
I geared my ad towards veteran suicide because veterans are one of the highest at-risk for suicide populations in the United States. I paired an image of a deployed soldier with with the emotional battle that suicidal veterans tend to battle. Many soldier suicidal experiences are linked to PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder), but they are afraid to seek support because they have been trained to be a fighter and don’t want to viewed as weak. The pairing of the soldier, the epitome of selflessness in the United States, with their emotional battle causes the audience to have desire to reach out and find a way to support their veteran family members and friends.
Color and Contrast
In these ads, color is used for emphasis and contrast. There is very little color used in either ad – a total of 1 1/2 sentences per ad. Bright red is used for the time frame and yellow/orange is used in the call to action. A majority of the ad is dark and uses monochromatic colors. The dark colors create a down-trodden emotion to help relate the seriousness of suicide and the increasing commonality of it in our country. The use of big bright red font allows the ad to grab the audiences’ attention and makes them focus on a short time frame, which is then followed with a sharp contrast of small white font that states how many suicides occur in the previously stated time frame. This stark contrast emphasizes the fact that we lose two people to suicide by the end of a Disney Channel tv show episode. It creates an emotional impact that makes the audience sit back just dumbstruck about how common suicide truly is. However, the small white font is then followed by a call to action in yellow/orange. The call to action encourages the audience to find out how they can learn about the signs of suicide which will allow them to help those around them. So, not only is there is an aesthetic contrast, there is also an emotional contrast. The dumbstruck and depressed emotion is then followed by a feeling hope because the audience is given an opportunity to help reduce suicide themselves.
When creating my ad I made sure to keep the dark and monochromatic color scheme to create the subdued and serious appearance. Obviously, because my ad focused on veteran suicide, I changed the suicide rate to represent how common it is for that specific population. By maintaining the strong contrast between the big red font and small white font emphasizes the fact that we lose one veteran to suicide almost every hour. This is also followed by the call to action in yellow font encouraging the audience to learn how to recognize the signs of suicidal thoughts in veterans so they can offer support to their family and friends.
Conclusion
Again, recreating an advertisement will help you better understand and use different design principles. By breaking down which principles make an advertisement effective, you can then replicate them in your own ad for the campaign, which will help you see how the principles interact and know how to use them them in future projects. Whether it is image content and its role in delivering the message or the contrast of both color and emotion, following the design principles mentioned here and in my previous posts will help you create a creative and effective advertisement.
Brandi Nessen's Visual Media 