Level(s): Grades 8 - 12

Length: 30 minutes

Overview:

This introductory lesson helps students understand how pervasive and influential advertising is in our culture and how teenagers are actively targeted by advertisers.

Learning Outcomes:

Students demonstrate:

• an awareness of the many different types of advertisements they encounter daily
• an understanding about how they, as consumers, are influenced by these commercial messages
• an appreciation of their position as a desirable demographic for advertisers

The Lesson

Whether or not they realise it, teens already know a lot about advertising. Many ads are targeted specifically at them and there are advertisements everywhere.

Ask your students to brainstorm the reasons why advertisers would want to target teens. Answers might include:

• Teenagers are important targets for advertisers since many of them have high disposable incomes (money from allowances or part time jobs that they can spend on things they like or want, but don't necessarily need).
  
• Teenagers are important targets for advertisers because companies need to build brand loyalty. They want people to start using their products when they are young and continue using them for the rest of their lives.

How do marketers reach teens?

• Ask students about some of the places they see ads. Answers might include some of the following: in bathrooms, on the net, bus shelters, bike racks, food packaging (fast food packaging, cereal boxes), matchbooks, billboards, coasters, under the ice at hockey games, on people's clothes, on shopping carts, on busses.
  
• Which of these locations do they consider to be the best for reaching teens?
  
• Ask students where they see ads in school. Answers may include the following: pop machines, scoreboards, clothes, book covers.
  
• Ask students to think of a place where there is no ads.

Place a sign at each end of the room (do this before the class starts). One will have "agree" on it and one will have "disagree" on it. Tell students they should place themselves along a continuum depending on whether or not they agree with the following statements.

Read the statements aloud, and give the students time to position themselves. After they have positioned themselves, ask them why they stood where they did.

• "I can ignore most advertising."
  
• "Songs from commercials stick in my head."
  
• "I have made a conscious effort to look like someone specific I have seen in an ad."
  
• "Some ads make me feel bad about myself or inadequate."

Ask them to write an entry in their media journals in response to the statement: "Advertising does not really affect me."

Evaluation

• Media journal entries

This lesson has been adapted from Seeing Beyond the Glam, a peer education workshop from the Expecting Respect Peer Education Program. The original workshop is designed for secondary students who want to conduct workshops with other students about advertising and its impact on teenagers. Adapted with permission.

For more information about the Expecting Respect Peer Education Program program or to obtain a copy of Seeing Beyond the Glam, e-mail sthompson@mcd.gov.ab.ca