Collett Dickenson Pearce Magazine Layout

This is the start of my layout for a magazine article. Most of the photography is my own and I've themed it around baseline magazine to answer the brief.

BLOCK 2 RESEARCH-Edward Bernays: Engineering of Consent

Ive just been reading an essay today by Bernays from the nineteen fiftys. It was called 'The engineering of consent'. It focused on public relations at the start of the twentieth century. Edward Bernays is known for being the founder of public relations as we know it. For his whole career he critically evaluated the publics views on advertising, propaganda and social patterns and pioneered public relations as a subject to be taught at universities. 

His essay evaluates the expansion of communication due to progression in the ways ideas could be broadcast. By the fifties everybody had a radio. newspapers were easily available and advertising space was much more available. 'The United States has become a small room where every whisper is magnified thousands of times' 


At the start of the essay Bernays talks about how the world is connected by a web of communication. 'This web of communications, some- times duplicating, crisscrossing, and overlapping, is a condition of fact, not theory. We must recognize the significance of modern communications not only as a highly organized mechanical web but as a potent force for social good or possible evil. We can determine whether this network shall be employed to its greatest extent for sound social ends.' I find this very interesting for it comes from a man fifty years ago who has described the internet of today 'social good or possible evil'.

I also read another journal of his which is titled 'propaganda' the parts i looked at talked about the regimentation of public opinion. Bernays states that it is impossible for man to make ethical, political and economical decisions by himself.

'In theory, everybody buys the best and cheapest commodities offered him on the market. In practice, if every one went around pricing, and chemically tasting before purchasing, the dozens of soaps or fabrics or brands of bread which are for sale, economic life would be hopelessly jammed. To avoid such confusion, society consents to have its choice narrowed to ideas and objects brought to it attention through propaganda of all kinds. There is consequently a vast and continuous effort going on to capture our minds in the interest of some policy or commodity or idea'

Bernays' claims that propaganda is not as demonising as it was at the height of world war two. 'Propaganda makes the world safe for democracy' Propaganda is advertising to a group with the same stance in a community. Even though Propaganda was seen as a weapon in World war two for its manipulative and jingoistic capabilities, it is in its original use, neutral. It has, right up to the modern day been used as a tool for public health reccomendations  and to encourage people to participate in census. Even today political parties use forms of propaganda for public manipulation. does this necessarily mean its demonising?

The One Day Brief.

this week we did a project in large groups and the brief was to create a campaign that encouraged woman to send men to the doctors more often, even for minor symptoms of problems.  This was the first time we worked in groups of more than four people. We infact had around twenty people in this group to complete the brief. the idea was to work in smaller teams within the group to gather different information on the subject. I decided to make a team that set questions to ask the public. We made a set of questions so that we could interview people. They were leant towards men and asked such things as- 'how often do you visit the doctor?' and 'when was the last time you visited the doctor?'  These sorts of questions proved very hard to ask. I found it difficult to ask the public, especially men of my age, about their views on the doctors. I found that asking men to complete  the questions as a survey on paper was easier for me and it gave more time for the men to answer the questions. we interviewed forty groups of people and after around an hour and a half took our research back to the 'table'. We presented our findings but i found that it seemed to be overpowered by the work of the researchers who had found out the hard facts online about men visiting the doctors.

The day before this project we were lectured on the importance of splitting large groups into more manageable groups of people because this is how advertising agencies work. They start with bosses, researchers, developers and creatives. I feel this structure definitely wasn't visible amongst our large group. We seemed to have about five people in the group who were very good at coming up with ideas but not very good at refining them. A couple of girls took the ideas and gave them direction but never really had the power over the large noisy group to put the ideas on paper. if i had to be honest i played a roll in disagreeing with most of the ideas. I wasn't really given the opportunity to say why though. When it came to presenting our ideas we had a campaign that used superheroes to portray men and the superheroes had to be forced or captured to go to the doctors by their super hero wives. My favourite campaign from the whole day was so simple though- a crap picture of batman with the tagline underneath saying be a hero check your balls. keeping it simple.

Rebranding 'Smash': Module 2

Module 2 seen us propose a rebrand  for a popular dehydrated potato product Smash. The project was done in groups again and we were asked to use interview tools from semester one to gather information on the product. We started  to gather information on the university campus. One of my teammates had set questions to ask the interviwees ranging from- 'what was your favourite childhood meal?' to 'would you ever consider buying smash?' We interviewed roughly six groups of people in a half hour period and noticed that almost all of them were students between the ages of 18-25. For this reason we decided we had to look at a broader range of people within Smashes target market and interview elsewhere. We took our investigation into town an targeted older people who we thought may have tried the product. The people we asked said they had tried smash in an era were ready meals, fast food and instant snack food had become more available and cheaper than fresh produce. slightly of track i know, but, I went to see the comedian Sean Lock last year. One of his jokes was about the kind of rubbish he ate as he was growing up in the seventies. He joked that he lived off a strict diet of mince and orange squash. So he always ran around hyper fuelled by the e numbers in his squash for the first ten years of his life. I kind of got this image from the older people i asked- 'oh.. smash used to taste so much better in the old days; probably because of all the crap it was made with'. Sean Lock was right then. 

So after we'd asked another 15 groups of people in town I headed home and made up my sachet of smash then abruptly binned it; a horrible gloopy mess i did not enjoy eating. I still persisted after lunch and we sat down to discuss the kind of people who were intrested in the product. We had to create model personas; a kind of persona that summarised the kind of people we had interviewed. We made three personas. we felt our best one was based on a woman called 'Brenda' she was retired and used smash as an ingredient for other recipes and occasionally as a side for main meals. we couldn't really see, from the information we'd gathered, smash being a product you'd buy solely to eat on it own.