Marketing Violence to Young People
No one knows better than communications industries that children and youth represent a huge market, due to both their own spending power and their influence on family spending decisions.
No one knows better than communications industries that children and youth represent a huge market, due to both their own spending power and their influence on family spending decisions.
As concerned adults, we also need to recognize when our anxieties about media violence are used to sell us on blanket censorship, ideology, and a variety of products.
More than anything else in media, news coverage influences what people and which issues are part of the national conversation and how those issues are talked about.[1] When it comes to Indigenous people and communities, constitutional issues, forest fires, poverty, sexual abuse and drug addiction sometimes appear to be the only topics are reported in the news.
That Indigenous women are likely to be victims of violence is not news: Indigenous women aged 25 to 44 are five times more likely to suffer a violent death than other women in Canada.
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.
In this lesson, students explore the gratuitous use of violence in sports.
In this lesson students develop an awareness of the ways in which public perceptions regarding young people have been affected by media portrayals of youth violence and youth crime.
In this lesson, students become aware of the types and amounts of violence in children's programming, and how media violence influences young viewers.
In the same way that Canadian news reporting does not reflect Canada’s multiculturalism, racial diversity ‘behind the scenes’ of news media is similarly disproportionate. Almost a quarter of the Canadian population identifies as a member of what Statistics Canada refers to as a “visible minority,” and while a 2021 study found a similar rate of representation in newsrooms, eight in ten Canadian newsrooms have no racialized journalists in leadership roles.