Shoe Advertisement 2005
I designed this advertisement for my Writing for Mass Communication (MMC2100) class. The class was presented with a new shoe called the "Float" from Pearl Izumi. Our objective was to design a print ad geared toward self-identified runners, male or female, 20 to 50 years old, with average income and education. I decided to target women runners and came up with this ad.

I chose to highlight the “float” nature of the shoe.  I wanted to show that Float shoes are so comfortable that running in them is comparable to running on air.  With such a soft approach to the shoe, the target audience would be women who hate the pain that can be involved with running.  I used the headline “Because you’re too good for the ground,” a line I thought sounded empowering to women -- even though you’re getting plenty of cushion with the Float, you can still be a powerful runner.  The idea of leaving the ground behind, expressed in the ad copy, shows that the shoes can overcome all of the obstacles that the ground presents by balancing, guiding and cushioning.  I found detailed information about the shoe’s technologies at the Pearl Izumi Web site, to set the shoes apart from the competition. 

The graphic I created shows a woman running far off the ground, a visual that I thought would catch the eye of the reader.  I made the headline cascade down for two reasons.  For one, it shows how the runner is above entirely everything in the visual.  Second, it makes the whole progression of the ad flow -- the reader’s eyes start at the runner, move down to the headline, and finish at the ad copy. 

The images of the shoe, including the one at the bottom of the page and the shoes on the runner’s feet, were all from the same image taken from the Pearl Izumi Web site.  The other images -- the runner and the background -- I found online through Google’s image search.  Specifically, the runner was at a Web site of stock graphics (http://www.buddycom.com/graphic/stock/) and the background I found on someone’s personal Web site (http://www.tele-actor.net/dan/files/pictures/June05/pages/My Neighborhood 03.html).  Using Photoshop, I put the Float shoes on the runner’s feet, put the runner in the air, extended the trees upward, and cut back the trees on the right to make room for the headline.

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