Sex in Advertising - Lesson
To introduce students to the use and prevalence of sexuality in advertising.
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.
Junk Food Jungle
This lesson familiarizes children with how and why “junk food” is advertised to kids. The lesson starts with an introduction to advertising and a discussion of the gimmicks involved in food advertising to kids. Students discuss the various foods they see advertised in their daily lives versus the ones they don’t see, drawing important points from this data. With this information in mind, students complete an advertising log and also choose an advertisement and analyzing its subject matter in relation to what they have just learned.
Watching the elections
Joe McGinniss’ book The Selling of the President had a shocking title for 1968, suggesting as it did that in the television age the presidency had become nothing more than another product to be packaged and sold. MediaSmarts’ resource, Watching the Elections (a lesson for Grades 8-12), shines a light on how the different aspects of an election – from the debates to political ads to the candidates themselves – are actually media products.
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.