Jasons Blog

I Don't want the advert to contain to much writen information, but at the
same time i need to give the audience a good understanding. The best way that I've found to do this is through visuals. Here is an example of what i think is an advert that successfully uses a lot of visuals to get the message across.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=plrcDeDa7LQ&feature=related

I really love this advert. I think it works very well making the audience look at a not very obvious reason why software piracy could be a bad thing. Its also humorous and this appears to be a key factor when trying to get an audience to remember something. It uses a video game medium that a lot of people can relate to of all ages. Theres not an overload of information (just some straight to the point text at the end) and its not boring so it doesn't make you want to zone out like a lot of the other piracy adverts do. Because of all of these factors In my mind this is highly successful.

If written information has to be given an effective way to do this is bullet points short and snappy. This way the audience will hopefully remember the information that i want them to. My thoughts on software piracy is that it is possible to slow it down but impossible to completely get rid of it. The two main ways that i have found work for stopping people illegally downloading are the moral approach and the shock approach. The Moral approach trys to connect with people and make them realize that they are doing something that is wrong. There is lots of different techniques using this approach, that can be used. These play on different emotions such as guilt. An example of an effective moral approach to similar advert is:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wf4pnY1wFiU

This works quite well as it uses real actors to get the point across. Another similar approach that i like has the actor musician Jack Black talking about
piracy

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-LkWKvMCzqA

However him not to sure that the moral approach is the best way forward i think it can work but then again at the same time i think a lot of people especially online aren't really bothered if the actors and musicians are losing out or not. I think most of the messages in these adverts are obvious to the audience already and a lot of them still continue to download illegally regardless.

The Shock approach instead of playing on the morals looks at the consequences of the users actions such as fines. They often make the audience think that they cant get away with piracy as they WILL be caught even though it is not normally the case. These type of adverts use emotions such as fear to scare the audience. A good example of this is the TV licensing adverts such as:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5a_QX3DECRE

A video i was watching on software piracy discusses that there is often freeware on the Internet that can be found but people often choose to ignore this and illegal download software that they have heard of. An example of this is Photoshop. After a quick look on Pirate bay i can see that Photoshop CS3 is the 6th most popular software application, with a huge 2684 seeders and 219 lechers at this current point in time. In my opinion there is no need to download programs such as Photoshop as their are nearly always free alternative such as GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) which does nearly exactly the same thing. In some cases these free alternatives can be better than the software that people are illegally downloading. So one approach to trying to get users to stop software piracy could be to advertise the freeware. Not only is there free software available on the net that many people don't know about or choose not to use but now with sites such as BBC i player and channel 4 catch up there is less reason for people download films. As with Spotify people can listen to music for free legally but the majority still choose to download albums illegally. I think the method of making people aware of the free alternatives to illegal software piracy, would have the highest success rate in an advert.