Kids, Alcohol and Advertising - Lesson 3: Understanding Brands
Understanding Brands is the third in this series and is intended as a stepping stone to Lesson 4, Interpreting Media Messages. In this lesson, students learn about the importance of branding for developing customer loyalty and recognition of products.
Click If You Agree
When you sign up for a service on a website or use an application for the first time, do you read the privacy policy and terms of use thoroughly? Or, like most of us, do you click “I Agree” as fast as you can?
Reading Media
In this lesson, students are introduced to the idea of “reading media” through a medium’s rules of notice and the maker’s framing choices of what to include and what to emphasize. After a modeled and then guided introduction to these ideas, students analyze a work to identify how it uses rules of notice and framing and consider what meaning these choices communicate.Ads That Don’t Look Like Ads
In this lesson, students learn what makes something an ad and how to distinguish advertisements from reviews, focusing on the key concepts of genre, tropes, bias, disclosure, and framing. Students begin by viewing and analyzing a video to prompt critical questions about the creator’s intent and visual style, then delve into the advertising genre by learning about its essential elements, like the presence of a product and brand. Students examine the differences between the “ad” and “review” genre and also use companion reading skills to evaluate the reliability and potential bias of a source by searching for undisclosed "brand deal" or "sponsored" content. Finally, students create two media pieces about the same product—one crafted as a persuasive ad and the other as an honest review—to demonstrate their ability to apply the genre elements and tropes learned throughout the lesson.Online Marketing to Kids: Protecting Your Privacy
This lesson introduces students to the ways in which commercial apps and websites collect personal information from kids and to the issues surrounding children and privacy on the Internet. Students begin by considering how comfortable they would be with people knowing various things about them, and then watch and discuss a video which explains how targeted advertising works. They then explore the idea of targeted advertising through a class exercise in which Prince Charming tries to target Cinderella with an ad for glass slippers, and then analyze how their own personal information might be used to target them with ads. In the second part of the lesson, students are introduced to privacy policies and how they are rated by the website Terms of Service, Didn’t Read. They read and analyze the site’s rating for a popular app and then learn ways to limit data collection. In an extension activity, students are introduced to the idea of “dark patterns” and imagine how the Wicked Queen might use them to convince Snow White to accept “poison” cookies.