Deployment Strategies

The deployment strategies project that we had to do really got me thinking about how much work is required to deploy rhetoric and incite some sort of movement. On the surface you would think, "Yeah, just hang up some posters here and there and you're done." But there's so much more than just that.

It starts with the actual piece of visual rhetoric. You have to tailor it to your target audience, which means that your first attempt at creating the rhetoric may not be the best one. As a younger person, I would naturally create rhetoric that would appeal to a younger audience, however if I wanted to appeal to an older audience I'd have to put a lot more thought into it - the colors, the layout, the size of the text, everything has to fit the target audience.

Then there's the actual message of the image. A lot of times someone supports a good cause, and then they create an image that represents their cause well, but the real question is, does that image actually inspire others to act? It takes some sort of interesting edge - sarcasm, humor, bitterness - to actually get a message across that will cause people to think about what they saw/read and act upon it. This can be a bit difficult because the type of tone that you decide to use has to fit your topic and purpose. You can't just talk about things like abortion using a humorous tone.

I would have to say pulling numbers and statistics and deciding where to put the rhetoric was the hardest part of the deployment strategy for me. For example, it may seem that putting up your rhetoric in a certain area is a good idea, but knowing exactly how many people and what type of people walk by that area is very important, and also very hard data to find. A spot may have high traffic but if only old people walk by when you're trying to communicate to a younger population then that spot turns out to be very bad. Likewise, if a spot has only younger people walking by it, but very low traffic, it may also be a bad spot too.