Strengths and Weaknesses

“ …one which causes us to make sense of what we have learned, why we have learned it and how that particular increment of learning took place. [...] Reflection is equally useful when our learning has been unsuccessful – in such cases indeed reflection can often give us insights into what may have gone wrong with our learning and how on a future occasion we might avoid now-known pitfalls …. (reflection)evaporates away unless we stop in our tracks to make one or other kind of crystallisation of it – some evidence.” - Race (2002)

Now that I have completed the majority of work on this project, I have began to reflect on my strengths and weaknesses within this project as well as within my professional life.

I think that my main strengths are that I am hard working, organised and ambitious. Throughout this project I have always kept to deadlines, produced all work that was asked of me and kept on top of everything. I think that working in a team has worked well, although I find I tend to take more of a leadership role which is something I need to work on. Im a good listener and me and my partner worked well at bouncing ideas off each other, joining different ideas together and talking about what media to use and so on. I think that often I am very creative and have interesting ideas and concepts, although sometimes I do become concentrated on one idea that I cannot move on from - this is something that I need to work on. In this module I think I have had a really good insight into advertising and how the process works from the brief to having a set of final ideas ready for creation. 

I feel that my weaknesses within this module have been a lack in previous knowledge, I didn't know a lot about how advertising has developed from the 1950s and what it used to be like. However, after watching a documentary within class called 'she's not a moron she's your wife' I felt I got a really quick, yet deep insight into how advertising has changed, although it was specifically orientated towards women. This over view has helped me to understand a bit more into the history of advertising and why it is how it is today. Another weakness I have is knowing about different techniques - i was unaware of guerilla advertising and other methods, although I feel I am now beginning to learn about these more. I have began reading some advertising based books, some which are on the reading list we have been given, and also some others. I've found already that these have taught me a lot about the industry, job roles within advertising agencies as well as the industry giants and important people within the industry such as John Hegarty. 

So far I feel I have began to gain a grasp of the basics of advertising; how to generate ideas, mock up ideas, develop ideas and apply these to media. I have also learnt what strap lines are, and have a better understanding of how to create them (and a good one hopefully!) I have learnt that the first ideas are usually the ideas that everyone has, but usually it is essential to get these out of the way before you can begin to think of something new and interesting.