Wieden and Kennedy

Wieden and Kennedy is an advertising agency “driven by creativity” and that prides itself on “building strong and provocative relationships between companines and their customers.” As such, they are an excellent body of work to explore for their creative and transformative ads. The agency has offices in 7 countries, which means it is a good body of work to explore concepts related to “representation” and contains ad campaigns from a variety of places and cultures.

Many people will recognize W+K’s classic, flagship ad campaigns: these include Nike’s “Dream Crazier”, Secret’s “Stress Tested for Women”, and P&G’s “Thank you, MOM”. These ad campaigns have played a pivotal role in transforming advertising by creatively making value-based appeals through a narrative that foregrounds diversity and inclusivity. The actual products appear in the background as everyday, extraordinary characters persevere through life’s challenges. While luxury brands have a long-standing history of appealing to customers’ values, these ads make us realize how vacuous our values are when it comes to brands, prompting a purchasing rationale that considers more than the sticker price.

In this new territory of advertising, companies and their consumers are challenged to consider their identities and are asked to align their wallets to their values. Hidden Brain has a few good episodes that discuss our relationship to branding and advertising in the 20th-21st century that dig into the complexities of identity and nostalgia. These podcast episodes serve as good resources to prompt critical thinking and discussion: one is entitled, “Our Brands, Our Selves” (a replay of “I Buy, Therefore I Am: How Brands Become Part of Who We Are”); the other is “This is Your Brain on Ads”. Hidden Brain is a good body of work to study in and of itself, and can be used to compliment other literary and non-literary studies over a 1 or 2 year course. I often have students write a discussion post on the podcast episode and discuss in small groups how the episode pushes their thinking about their guided inquiry.

Aims

• foster confidence in drawing conclusions about a body of advertisements;
• develop students’ interpretation and anlaysis skills;
• develop students’ visual analysis skills;
• practice making oral arguments that use visual and liguistic references to support claims about a work;
• consider concepts such as “identity”, “transformation”, ‘creativity”, and “representation” alongside a range of global issues related to culture, technology, community, etc.;
• appreciate how W+K use narrative in their ad campaigns and its effects.

The resources in this unit include:

• A lesson exloring the “Meet Visa” campaign as a mentor body of work.
• A step-by-step guided inquiry project.
• Sample responses for the “Meet Visa” mentor text.
• “How to Analyze an Advertisement” guide

Teaching Resources (PDF)

Teaching Resources (Word)

A Note about the Resources

“Meet Visa” Lessons
We spent two 70 minute lessons working our way through the “Meet Visa” campaign. For the second lesson, students presented their findings in their assigned pairs and the whole group gave them affirmative and critical feedback on their findings. For larger classes, this could be done as a jigsaw with partners presenting to each other in groups of 6.

Sample responses are provided for the introductory activity of the “Meet Visa” lesson.

W+K Guided Inquiry Project
I gave students five 70-minute lessons to complete the project. I let students set their own pace through the phases, making sure they stuck to a reasonable timline. I checked their inquiry question and thesis statement before they advanced to the next phase.

The assessment is a 5 minute presentation that marries the inquiry approach of the IB HL Essay with the presentation skills of the Individual Oral. This gives students the skill development and practice they need early in the course with the freedom to pursue their chosen W+K body of work for an official IB assessment at a later stage in the course. For this assessment, I gave feedback and witheld quantitative marks from the students. I used the HL Essay rubric to collect my own quantative data on how students performed in each of the 4 criteria.

After the project, I put each students’ video on a Padlet and asked students to give each other feedback on the strengths of their peers’ presentations. This allowed them to see what other students had chosen, appreciate presentation approaches, and establish patterns and trends across the body of works to get a stronger sense of W+K’s style. Then, we listened to the Hidden Brain Episode, “Our Brands, Our Selves“, and I asked students to write a discussion post responding to the prompt: After listening to the episode “Our Brands, Our Selves”, what new thoughts or reflections do you have about our relationship to brands? What new insights did it give you about the Wieden and Kennedy ad campaign you explored? We closed the unit by watching this talk by “Dan Wieden” that discusses W+K’s philosophies as well as the ways in which they approach relationships and value chaos.

Photo by Scott Beale on Flickr