characters

 After writing the rough draft of the development of the plot for the ad I began to roughly decide the characters that will feature in the ad. Due to the nature of an emotional approach to advertising we feel that by choosing stereotypical characters we will be able to get our message out to our young target audience because teens would have similar relationships with their own parents, friends and teachers.

The character who we will call victim, for now, represents a teenage girl who has committed suicide due to serve online harassment from one of her school peers who will also be featured in the plot. Our group is unsure weather we should remain our victim nameless or name the character whom the other characters are addressing. If we name the character we do add personality to the character and put a name to the now dead main character. However if we leave the character nameless our audience may relate further as this would become symbolic of all teens who have killed themselves as a result of cyber bullying.

The victim was a teenage girl in high school between the ages of 15-17, the same age as our target market. The character was cyber bullied and took her life as she felt the pressure was too much to handle.  This loss of life has dramatically affected the lives of her loved ones who unfortunately noticed the change in her personality but did not take action to help.   

The bully is represented by the character Jenna the classmate of the victim who harassed the victim online after being caught bulling the victim at school. Like many of the attitudes of  bullies, Jenna justifies her actions by joking around and that she wouldn’t have physically hurt the victim and that the victim overacted to the situation. As a consequence of her actions Jenna now has a criminal record and her job opportunites have diminished. Jenna seems very remorseful of her behavior and encourages other ‘bullies’ not to make her mistake.

The friend of the victim is also featured in the ad, she is the same age as both bully and victim and represents those teens ,who know about cyber bullying situations and do nothing. The friend feels very remorseful and blames herself for not taking action against the harassment.

The teacher of the girls is also featured, she represents the schools which have a duty to keep students safe against all forms of bullying and harassment. The teacher is very sympathetic to the situation she acknowledges her wrong doings and admits she had intentions to speak to the girls parents but never got around to it.

The last character is the mother of the victim, a very emotional character who is stricken by guilt and feels she should have been more involved in her daughters life. The mother character is similar age as the teacher and obviously from the older generation who may not be aware of what cyber bullying is.

Jasmine x