EQ: What makes a successful advertisement? 

SQ: What influence does advertising have on our culture? How does our culture influence advertising

What have you discovered about your process, your habits?
Now, what do you know you don’t know? Circle back to your essential question.

The senior project has shown me a lot about how I work. Granted, this is one of my first individual studies so there is been successes and some failures. I notice that I benefit from keeping a daily schedule. While I fell out of doing this some days, the days where I kept a schedule seemed to be my most productive days. Along the lines of a daily schedule, most Monday’s I tried to map out my work week on my google calendar. This helped me envision the scope of my project and reach maximum productivity (making sure I could limit the amount of unnecessary work I did while still completing my 20 hours). However, while keeping a daily schedule helped me stay organized, I noticed that I often would not complete everything I wanted to do that day. Specifically, some days I would fall into an extensive rabbit hole of research for many more hours than expected. It’s debatable whether this was a good or bad thing but I almost all of the research I conducted felt informative.

I think that it’s also important for me to mention my state of motivation throughout this project. I acknowledge, as a whole, that I benefit from being in a working enviornment. Specifically, I feed off of other’s energy and therefore thrive in a classroom setting where everyone else around me is working. To not have this environment was challenging. Some days I found it really hard to feel motivated to do my work because I was doing it all alone. Some days I would work alongside my mom and sit in on some of her conference calls which provided a nice “office feel.” On those day’s I would not only feel most motivated to but most excited to get my work done. This moment is when my need for outside motivation was further solidified.

Circling back to my essential question, I would say that I don’t know a whole lot about success in advertising from the POV of someone actually working in advertising. Or at least, I don’t know it to the extent to which I would have hoped to because as in the end, I only interviewed two people. Nevertheless, I still think I was able to answer my essential question. Rather than learning the concrete keys to success from an outsider, I learned it on my own. Throughout this process, I was able to conduct extensive research and eventually, define my own version of success.