Advertising has been constant for years even when it shows up in different media. But are people becoming more conscious of ads (especially with efforts to not target kids) or has the integration of ads into social media and influencer marketing made them harder to spot?
Advertising: It’s everywhere. No, it’s not your imagination. The amount of advertising and marketing we are exposed to daily has exploded: on average, we see more than four thousand ads each day.[1] At the gas pumps, in the movie theatre, in a washroom stall, on stickers on fruit, during sporting events and plastered all over social media—advertising is pretty much impossible to avoid.
In this lesson students explore the relationship between athletes and advertising through a number of different activities.
This lesson introduces students to the ways in which packaging is designed to attract kids.
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.
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.
In this lesson, students consider the role of snack foods in a healthy diet. The teacher then guides them on a tour of popular sites aimed at children, where the class identifies and classifies the advertising encountered there and looks at how the food products being advertised fit – or don’t fit – in the food groups found in the Canada Food Guide. Students then play the game Co-Co’s AdverSmarts to understand some of the techniques used by online food marketers and then create their own mock website promoting a healthy diet.