Hello everyone! My name is Tiffany Carey and I am a senior Interactive Multimedia Major with a Minor in Marketing. While deciding on my Senior Thesis, I wanted to make sure that it incorporated the skills I gained in both my Major and Minor. I also wanted to make sure my thesis focused on the areas that I was particularly interested in, like Digital Media, Photoshop, Social Media, Digital Marketing and Advertising. I knew I wanted my Senior Thesis to reflect the aspirations I had for my future career in digital marketing and/or a social media department for a company. This led to my creation of my idea for Senior Thesis, “Modernizing Old Advertisements” (Title still to be determined).
My Senior Thesis idea was developed when I started looking at Old Advertisements for companies and businesses, particularly the old Coca Cola ads. I loved the overall aesthetic of them, with the vintage look that you do not see in advertisements anymore. However, I noticed that many of the advertisements would not fit the standards of modern society. The advertisements were outdated due to the harmful stereotypes that some displayed or they did not reflect what people look like in today’s society. For example, many of the advertisements displayed women in a particular role, the care taker that looked after the “home”. In one of the advertisements above, you can even see one women wearing an apron. Another key aspect of advertisements that I noticed, was that the women all looked very similar. You can hardly tell them a part and there were no distinguishing features on any of them.
When looking at this, I decided that I wanted to try and modernize these advertisements. The goal is to recreate the vintage aesthetic of the advertisements and have it somewhat match the original. However, the key difference would be the individuals showcased in the photos and the wording on the advertisements. Instead, I am going to modernize these factors to bring this style of advertisements to our society today. For example, I might use my sister as a model in one of the advertisements, because she has tattoos. Back during the original advertisements, they probably could not imagine highlighting someone having tattoos. Overall, the main idea of my thesis is to maintain the look of the original advertisement, but fix the problematic elements of them. Once completed, I can then display the differences of the two advertisements, the old advertisement and my modernized version, by posting them on social media. I can post both photos side-by-side, to create a conversation about the topic online.
Currently, I have been trying to research how to recreate the aesthetic of these advertisements. What I was surprised to discover during my research, was that there is not one video that solely highlights this technique. When I first developed my idea, I thought there may be a video demonstrating how to recreate some of the old Coca Cola advertisements, due to it being such a popular brand. However, so far, I have found no video that such a demonstration exists. Instead, I have slowly been trying to find videos that I may be able to reference or take techniques from. So far, the best video that I have discovered is featured above, called “How To Create a Retro Pin-Up Poster in Photoshop”. The video takes a regular photograph of a model, and uses Photoshop to make it look retro. At the moment, it seems like this video showcases the best technique for me to use when I create my own advertisement.
There are a few next steps that I want to accomplish for my Senior Thesis. First, I should decide if I am only going to stick with only Coca Cola Advertisements, or if I should branch out into other brands. If I were to include other brands, it would allow me to have a more wide variety of choice regarding the advertisements I want to modernize. However, I would then have to decide if I should stay in the same era as the Coca Cola advertisements or if should allow myself to explore a different time period. Second, I need to workshop and finally decide on a title to my Senior Thesis. While “Modernizing Old Advertisements” gets the point across to audiences, it is not a fun title. Lastly, I want to use the video that I featured above and do a practice attempt of the technique. This would allow me to understand the concept and technique better, before I try to recreate it for one of my modernized advertisements. For my practice attempt, I would probably just use a random photograph that I have on my computer already or find an appropriate photo online to use. Overall, my Senior Thesis is slowing developing into a concrete premise with the research I am conducting.