Adversmarts: Understanding Food Advertising Online
In this lesson, students are introduced to the idea of online advertising and look at the ways that marketers create immersive and appealing online environments that draw and hold children’s attention. After studying common advertising techniques, students play an educational game online that lets them put their learning into action by “creating” a site advertising a fictitious cereal, Co-Co Crunch. Students then look at examples of real commercial environments and watch for “weasel words” used by advertisers.
Packaging Tricks - Lesson
This lesson introduces students to the ways in which packaging is designed to attract kids.
The Pornography Debate: Controversy in Advertising - Lesson
To introduce the issue of pornography for classroom discussion. To help students understand the difficulty in determining the sometimes very fine lines between erotica, freedom of expression, and sexual exploitation and to familiarize them with guidelines for making these distinctions.
Body Positive Ads
This lesson helps students understand the relationship between body image and marketing by exploring Aerie and Dove’s body positive advertising campaigns. Students begin by reading about the impact that body positive advertising campaigns have on companies, as well as on their consumers. Students will then look at body positive ads aimed towards men and read research about how there is a lack of representation in this field. They will then deconstruct a series of traditional ads compared to body positive ones and discuss how marketers target "ideal beauty" messages to both men and women and whether they are effective. Finally, students will evaluate whether body positive ads are effective in general or not through discussion.
Online Commerce
Kids don’t just see ads in media: more and more, they buy things right on their screens. This section looks at the ways that young people shop online and how they can be manipulated into spending.