Communication+Strategy

commnunication strategy.  Our communication strategy, as laid out by Mary-Margaret Jones, consists of the objective, goals, audience, strategy, tactics, and finally the measurement. The **objective** of our endeavour is to collect one hundred student signatures at the end of the presentation period on April 1, 2010. These signatures will indicate that the student who signed is not only now aware of the dangers within advertising today, but also that they agree to scrutinize any advertising they come into contact with after that session with a more critical eye.

We **believe** that through our awareness campaign students will begin to acknowledge the portrayal of unhealthy and unrealistic beauty standards for women, as well as the promotion of gender and racial stereotypes in advertising, and thus no longer mindlessly accept these ideals. We hope to help draw students away from the spell of mass media advertising and the various dominant ideals it broadcasts. Our target **audience** would typically be, second to third year students at the University of Toronto, but can be easily expanded to include all years of study as well as professors.

What we are communicating, or what our “**strategy**” consists of, is the imminent and pressing need to not simply swallow advertisements and its hidden meanings without protest and conscious thought. As a result of constantly being bombarded by advertising, one simply cannot tune it out. Thus, advertising permeates our consciousness and through this connection easily transmits whatever hegemony is currently in place.

Our **tactics** include targeting our audience through visual and informational aides. We will use specific examples of advertisements (print and video examples) that promote these ideals to engage the audience, and to help them retain the information learned, we intend on developing pamphlets that they can take with them once finished with the session. We hope that the initial draw of the bright colours and loud sounds of our examples in advertising will be supplemented by the statistics and quick facts supplied in the pamphlet. Furthermore, we intend on engaging our audience with various activities at our station complete with prizes.

We will **measure** the success of our campaign by whether or not we achieved our target number of signatures after the session. If it is not accomplished we will examine why that is, and if it is successful we will look to further our campaign and seek out other ways to help spread awareness.