Children and advertising
Kids are a highly desirable market for advertising: they control almost 150 billion dollars of spending in the U.S. alone and have a lifetime of spending ahead of them.
Kids are a highly desirable market for advertising: they control almost 150 billion dollars of spending in the U.S. alone and have a lifetime of spending ahead of them.
Kids are a highly desirable market for advertising: they control almost 150 billion dollars of spending in the U.S. alone and have a lifetime of spending ahead of them.
Parents of young children have an important role to play in protecting their kids from invasive marketing and in educating them about advertising from an early age.
In this lesson students consider diversity representation in video games by identifying examples of diversity in the games they play, comparing their findings to statistics on diversity in the Canadian population.
This lesson introduces students to the online marketing techniques that are used to target children on the Internet. It begins with a guided discussion about the similarities and differences between traditional marketing methods and online advertising and why the Internet is such a desirable medium for advertisers to reach young people. Student activities include a survey of the marketing techniques used on several commercial websites for children; the creation of a commercial website for kids that incorporates common marketing strategies; and an analysis of case studies about online marketing to young people.
In January, American Vice-President Joe Biden met with video game industry representatives in the wake of the tragic events at Sandy Hook to discuss the possible relationship between video games and gun violence. Five days later, President Barack Obama asked the United States Congress to fund more research to study the potential link between violence and video games, noting that “We don’t benefit from ignorance”.
This lesson series contains discussion topics and extension activities for teachers to integrate the TVOKids Original series Wacky Media Songs. This lesson focuses on enabling students to make media and use existing content for their own purposes.
In this lesson, students talk about dressing up and taking on identities that are similar to or different from them. They are then introduced to the idea of avatars as a kind of “dressing up” inside video games and consider the ways in which the technical, generic and aesthetic limitations on avatar creation and customization affect their choices and their ability to represent themselves online.
In this lesson students look at less obvious methods used by advertisers to reach consumers. Students first learn about “soft sell” ads that don’t make specific claims about a product. They then consider reasons why companies choose to use them over hard sell techniques. They will then focus specifically on why various companies might choose to use soft sell techniques as subtle forms of advertising in groups.