Visual Medium

I think that for my visual medium, I would want to utilize a billboard to work towards the goals of my rhetoric project. Often times, dairy companies will advertise using billboards along interstates and highways in order to recommend their products like milk and yogurt and cheese to people, so I think it would be useful and more familiar to viewers to advertise milk alternatives in the same way as their dairy counterparts. I think billboards are also fairly useful in the realm of advertising and rhetoric because they're something relatively briefly seen, but can get a lot of attention if they're somewhat shocking, eye catching, or particularly distinguished from other billboards.

If I were to make a billboard advertising milk alternatives, I would either make it similar to the billboard of a dairy company, or focus it on the negative effects of milk by utilizing my information on the negative effects the dairy industry has on cows or on the environment. Going with the dairy-based ad, I would probably show a brand of products like Silk soy milk or Almond Breeze almond milk since those are the most readily available products in stores with a price comparable to regular dairy milk. I could also use a slogan playing off of the popular "Got Milk?" campaign that was very prevalent in the 2000s--something like "Don't get milk, get milk alternatives" or something along those lines. In going the other direction, I could also try to persuade people to use milk alternatives instead of milk by showing cows in a field, or a person at the doctors office with a phrase like "Think Before You Drink". I know PETA has run similar ads in order to push people towards vegetarianism and veganism, particularly in places like California.

While I think that these billboards could be effective, I also feel like they wouldn't be a practical choice for me to use for several reasons. One would be that billboards can be expensive to rent out and put up, depending on the type of location you're looking for. A billboard in the city can cost exponentially more that a billboard along a country highway for example, because the billboard real estate would not gain as much traffic on a country highway as it would in a populated city. I also don't know a lot of statistics on what forms of advertising would be effective to viewers, especially when it comes to dietary and food advertising. I feel like it's also a bit impractical to advertise for people to make a lifestyle change, which is why if i were to execute a billboard I'd rather advertise for the milk alternatives product.