One of the most effective ways to study ads is to have students produce their own ads or create parodies of ads, something that you will actually be doing at the end of this module for use in modeling this process for your students. By having to consider techniques and strategies for selling a product, students are having to think about the techniques and strategies they are critiquing in ads. Students could create a new product or consider using existing products and then create magazine, video, or web-based ads. They could then share their ads with peers and garner feedback as to the effectiveness of their ads.

Or, based on parodies/spoofs of ads in Adbusters Magazine, students could select examples of deceptive ads and construct their own parodies or spoofs of ads.

False Advertising: A Gallery of Parody

Zapavision: Parodies of ads and movie trailers

Unofficial Calvin Klein Ads Archive

Why Milk—parodies of the Got Milk ads

Lampoonery: ad parodies

Teenz247: parodies of smoking ads

Nicknamers: parodies of branding

Funny Adverts: Spoof Ads

Webquest: creating ad

Webquest: Create an anti-pollution ad

Webquests: create anti-smoking ads
How will you advertise your product on the WWW?
Day One and Two: Defining the Task

Teaching Activity: Parodying Ads

Students can create their own parody of an ad for a fictitious or actual product; you could also create a parody or spoof on an ads such as those found in Adbusters.

Go to the Adbusters site on how to create your own ad:
Follow the instructions on this site that involve the following steps:

1. Decide on your communication objective
2. Decide on your target audience
3. Decide on your format
4. Develop your concept
5. The visual (you may want to select on-line images from art-clip files or from on-line images to insert into a Word or PowerPoint document).
6. The headline
7. The copy
   Subheads
   The signature
8. Some mistakes to avoid

You may also want to create a parody or spoof of an ads; for examples go to the Adbusters site
You can also find examples of anti-smoking ads such as the following spoof on the Malboro ads

• Write out a description of your intended message, audience, and concept, along with a rough description of the ad itself.

• Create the ad as a Word or PowerPoint file using clip art/Web-images.

• Then, post your ads on the nicenet.org documents site, along with your description of your intended message, audience, and concept

• Share your ad on the tappedin.org with some peers, who should describe their perceptions of your intended message, the audience appeals employed, and their evaluation of its overall effectiveness.

• Compare their perceptions of the ad with your intended message, audience, and concept, noting reasons for similarities and differences.
  

Your ad and discussion of the ad will be evaluated in terms of your ability to:

• clearly define your intended message, audience, and concept.

• employ images, language, intertextual references, and layout in a manner that conveys your intended message and concept, and gain audience identification.

• assess reasons for disparities between intended meanings and audience responses.

Webquests: Advertising:

Mrs. Horton's Advertising Webquest

Come Swim in my River

Interpreting advertising images

Creative Writing Advertising Project

Media Propoganda

AD Dissection 101

Advertisers: Interpreters of our dreams?

Cyberganda Advertising

Building an Ad Campaign

Advertising

42explore.com

We close this module with an example of an advertising unit created by Heather Johnson in CI5472, Spring 2002, that incorporates much of the material covered in this module.

AN ADVERTISING UNIT

I used spoof ads and regular ads from adflip.com and adbusters.com. I transferred them onto transparencies and used them for the unit. Go to http://www210.pair.com/udticg/lessonplans/consumerism for worksheets that accompany this lesson.

Teens in Culture: Do advertisements influence or reflect teenage culture?

INTRODUCTION:

The objective of this unit is to make teens aware of the way in which they are marketed by advertisers. Teens see approximately 24 hours of television a week compared to the 30 hours they are in the classroom; discussing implications and deconstructing the media is a key element to their processing of the ads.

• There are dozens of activities and ideas listed here that are aimed at helping students focus in on the way in which the media manipulates their attention and buying habits.

• Accompanying the unit will be several articles from the magazine “Adbusters” which offers students the chance to look at ads in a different light.

• Looking at “spoof” ads assists the students in looking at advertising in a different light. Students will be asked to create their own advertising pitch in the end, and they are encouraged to use a “spoof” ad as their marketing pitch.

• The video “Merchants of Cool” and the “Best Commercials of All Time” will be used in this unit to accompany the material.

To start off the unit, the students partake in the prompt below; students and teacher then discuss commercials on a basic level of entertainment. Conversation as such can easily develop, especially when it concerns commercials, for there is a quality of the commercial that makes it memorable and fun to discuss. (Take the hype of the Superbowl commercials/or the Oscar commercials).

Ads have become a social connection among peers and coworkers, as common phrases such as “whasssup?” enter the classroom and other environments. Recognizing the influence of such a medium is crucial to establish right away with students.

Next we delve into the ads themselves, articles about ads, spoof ads, videos, reflection on ways in which we live in an ad-based world, and in-class discussions. The unit and activities are enough for at least three weeks.

PART ONE:

I. WHAT DO TEENAGERS WANT? Before we examine ads, students will first reflect upon what they want, as teenagers. By examining our desires, we may know our values. We will do some self-reflection, gather some information and compare this data to advertising analysis that we will do later in the unit.

FOCUS QUESTION: What do you suppose is a utopian solution? Think about the term and research it if you don’t know what the word “utopian” means.

PART TWO:

HOMEWORK ASSIGNMENT: Ad Inventory
Using WORKSHEET 2, students will identify the ads they see from school to home that day. They may include ads they see at school. They will identify the place the ad is found (bus stop bench, fast food sign, etc.) and what the ad is for WORKSHEET 2 <worksheet2.htm>.

Another activity for the classroom:

Have students pair up and chose a market they wish to explore — teenage girls, teenage boys, young children, mothers, fathers, grandparents, etc. Together they gather ads from this “genre” and find patterns, flaws, deceptive things that exist within the ads. Does it represent the audience that it is trying to sell its product to? Or does the advertiser make it appear as if the audience “Needs/Wants” things that are not necessary? Were there any positive, well-represented portrayals of the audience in the ads that you found? Project results and individual write up with reaction to the assignment/project will be due. The students will present their findings to the class in a two-minute presentation. Here are some questions to be asked while analyzing a magazine:

• what is the title/who does it speak to?

• what connotations are there from such a title?

• what audience is the magazine trying to capture?

• what clues do you have that indicate that this is the target market?

• what kinds of body language is expressed in the magazine?

• how do the different magazines of the same genre compare?

• what products are being advertised?

• how are men and women represented in the magazine?

PART THREE:

ANALYZING ADVERTISING : WHAT ARE ADS REALLY SELLING? In the following lessons, students will learn about the persuasive techniques used by advertisements. They will identify these techniques in print and TV ads and then analyze the messages of the ads.

HOMEWORK ASSIGNMENT:
Find two “effective” print (magazine, newspaper, internet hard copy) ads to bring to class tomorrow. If students ask what defines an “effective” ad, tell them that they are to decide and we will discuss this tomorrow.

FREEWRITE ACTIVITY:
What do you think is the meaning of moral panic?

HOMEWORK ASSIGNMENT:
Find ads that correspond to your desires on your desire chart, worksheet #1.

PART FOUR:

THE TEEENAGE DEMOGRAPHIC: COOL HUNTING: Teens as Targets. In this section, students will explore the ways in which companies directly target them. It will be the final piece in answering the question: Does advertising influence or reflect teen culture? Quickwrite: Were you able to find ads that correspond to your desires? Discuss. Advertisers hope they can appeal to your desires because they are spending great amounts of resources to reach you, the teenage demographic. Add demographic to vocabulary list <vocabulary.html>.

Article 11

Slice of ’za proves brand loyalty is totally stupid!

Is the slavish brand loyalty of your peers getting you down? Are your high school’s corridors awash in swooshes and Tommy colors? Is every lunch hour a pilgrimage to Taco Bell or Pizza Hut? It’s the same old story — in the struggle for personal identity, it’s easier to buy a pre-packaged model than to create your own.

But it’s also easy to expose brand-name conformity with a simple experiment. 1. Pick a brand that your peers pledge allegiance to. For example, Pizza Hut. Corral some students in a room and order in a pizza. 2. Blindfold your test subjects. Feed each blindfolded person one slice of pizza, telling them it’s fresh from the Hut. Next, feed them a second, identical slice, and tell them it’s anything else — Uncle Albert’s Down Home Pizza, for example. 3. Ask them which slice tasted better.

Ninth graders Marcelo Choi and Sean Merat tried this procedure in their science project, “Do Commercials Work?” at Burnaby South Secondary School in Vancouver. In their experiment, all 16 test subjects said the Pizza Hut slice tasted better than the other slice.

“How can this be?” asks Merat, indignantly. “It’s the same pizza, from the same box.”

Variations on the test are endless. Choi and Merat also buttonholed loyal Nike-wearing students. While they tried on both Reebok and Nike shoes, the blindfolded students were told they were trying on the opposite brand. All eight test subjects said the Nike shoes were more comfortable — then had their blindfolds removed to discover they were wearing Reeboks.

That’s the moment of truth jammers live for. “Some said Nike was still cooler,” Merat says. But a few admitted it was time to start looking beyond the brand.
— Eliza Strickland

CRITICAL CONSUMERISM VOCABULARY

REFLECTION ACTIVITY:

It seems that we have hit the ceiling cap in this digital age: what do you think is left to invent? Where do we go from here? Do we recycle old ideas and make them modern?

DEFINITIONS OF PROPAGANDA TECHNIQUES

Propaganda

Many of the characteristic features of advertising and propaganda are similar. As consumers we are both cynical and paranoid when it comes to advertising. Although the average American is most likely not making comparisons between advertising and propaganda, everyone knows advertising is designed to sell more product. Advertising is propaganda whose purpose is to develop allegiance to a product or corporation instead of a government.

As Professor Widdig notes, propaganda is content-independent. He made a short list of defining characteristics of propaganda. It is systematic manipulation. It is geared to a mass audience. It has high emotional density. It uses ideas that are already present, and themes that are common to a community. It creates an "us vs. them" mentality. It never refers to unresolved issues and is not humorous. It uses history as raw material which it reshapes to present its ideology as the logical outcome of history.

All advertising is propaganda in the broadest sense of the word, but in its own subclass we tend to distinguish it from other propaganda. This is merely semantics, as the major impact of the word propaganda is not its literal meaning but its rhetorical power and connotations. Manipulation to buy a product or manipulation by a government to support it tend to use the same methods.

Advertising is definitely designed for a mass audience such as television viewers or magazine readers. Content with high emotional density is only one method advertising uses. In some ways, advertising is more sophisticated than what we think of as traditional examples of propaganda. It appeals to preexisting ideas in consumer culture. We already buy lots of products. We like being competed for by companies and products. In theory, this competition results in better products. In practice it makes us feel valuable. The creation of an "us vs. them" mentality is again only one of the methods advertising uses. Other approaches emphasize the political values of a company, use celebrity figures, or use sex appeal.

Advertising differs, however, from propaganda in its use of humor. Many advertisements incorporate an element of humor. In this sense, perhaps advertising is the most advanced form of propaganda. It is certainly the most practiced. It makes sense that it should be the best evolved and adapted. There are also certain ethical differences between advertising a product and convincing a nation that your dictatorship is what they truly desire, although they are subtle.

The web has added a new aspect to manipulation and propaganda. Because of the nature of the web, users expect to access information that they are choosing to access. Search engines make this possible to a large extent. But when a search engine begins tailoring its responses and advertising based on the subject a user is searching on, a more subtle manipulation than ever takes place. Advertising actually modifies itself in real time and becomes specific to each user.

Web sites can now give cookies, and use them to track how a user moves through them and how often they visit and what they look for. These sites can then present a customized form of advertising based on this information or even send email to a user. Propaganda just got personal. The web is just another medium and, as Widdig states, propaganda can take place in any and all medium. Advertising is not bad, and neither is propaganda, as long as we are aware of it and how it attempts to manipulate us.

Propaganda: Types of Propaganda

BANDWAGON: The basic idea behind the bandwagon approach is just that, "getting on the bandwagon." The propagandist puts forth the idea that everyone is doing this, or everyone supports this person/cause, so should you. The bandwagon approach appeals to the conformist in all of us: No one wants to be left out of what is perceived to be a popular trend.

EXAMPLE: Everyone in Lemmingtown is behind Jim Duffie for Mayor. Shouldn't you be part of this winning team?

TESTIMONIAL: This is the celebrity endorsement of a philosophy, movement or candidate. In advertising, for example, athletes are often paid millions of dollars to promote sports shoes, equipment and fast food. In political circles, movie stars, television stars, rock stars and athletes lend a great deal of credibility and power to a political cause or candidate. Just a photograph of a movie star at political rally can generate more interest in that issue/candidate or cause thousands, sometimes millions, of people to become supporters.

EXAMPLE: "Sam Slugger", a baseball Hall of Famer who led the pros in hitting for years, appears in a television ad supporting Mike Politico for U.S. Senate. Since Sam is well known and respected in his home state and nationally, he will likely gain Mr. Politico many votes just by his appearance with the candidate.

PLAIN FOLKS: Here the candidate or cause is identified with common people from everyday walks of life. The idea is to make the candidate/cause come off as grassroots and all-American.

EXAMPLE: After a morning speech to wealthy Democratic donors, Bill Clinton stops by McDonald's for a burger, fries, and photo-op.

TRANSFER: Transfer employs the use of symbols, quotes or the images of famous people to convey a message not necessarily associated with them. In the use of transfer, the candidate/speaker attempts to persuade us through the indirect use of something we respect, such as a patriotic or religious image, to promote his/her ideas. Religious and patriotic images may be the most commonly used in this propaganda technique but they are not alone. Sometimes even science becomes the means to transfer the message.

EXAMPLE: The environmentalist group PEOPLE PROMOTING PLANTS, in its attempt to prevent a highway from destroying the natural habitat of thousands of plant species, produces a television ad with a "scientist" in a white lab coat explaining the dramatic consequences of altering the food chain by destroying this habitat.

FEAR: This technique is very popular among political parties and PACs (Political Action Committees) in the U.S. The idea is to present a dreaded circumstance and usually follow it up with the kind of behavior needed to avoid that horrible event.

EXAMPLE: The Citizens for Retired Rights present a magazine ad showing an elderly couple living in poverty because their social security benefits have been drastically cut by the Republicans in Congress. The solution? The CRR urges you to vote for Democrats.

OGICAL FALLACIES: Applying logic, one can usually draw a conclusion from one or more established premises. In the type of propaganda known as the logical fallacy, however, the premises may be accurate but the conclusion is not.

EXAMPLE:
• Premise 1: Bill Clinton supports gun control.
• Premise 2: Communist regimes have always supported gun control.
• Conclusion: Bill Clinton is a communist.
We can see in this example that the Conclusion is created by a twisting of logic, and is therefore a fallacy.

GLITTERING GENERALITIES: This approach is closely related to what is happening in TRANSFER (see above). Here, a generally accepted virtue is usually employed to stir up favorable emotions. The problem is that these words mean different things to different people and are often manipulated for the propagandists' use. The important thing to remember is that in this technique the propagandist uses these words in a positive sense. They often include words like: democracy, family values (when used positively), rights, civilization, even the word "American."

EXAMPLE: An ad by a cigarette manufacturer proclaims to smokers: Don't let them take your rights away! ("Rights" is a powerful word, something that stirs the emotions of many, but few on either side would agree on exactly what the 'rights' of smokers are.)

NAME-CALLING: This is the opposite of the GLITTERING GENERALITIES approach. Name-calling ties a person or cause to a largely perceived negative image.

EXAMPLE: In a campaign speech to a logging company, the Congressman referred to his environmentally conscious opponent as a "tree hugger."

Ad Attack! Analysis Chart

• Describe the product or service presented in this ad.

• Describe the young people portrayed in the ad: What are they doing? What are they wearing? Where do they live? What seems to be important to them?

• Compare your life to theirs? How does this comparison make you feel?

• Would you like to be like these young people? Why or why not?

• Circle a phrase below to rate this ad on how accurately it portrays teens.
  

  • Got it right!
    

  • Pretty good
    

  • Needs a rewrite
    

  • Who ARE those kids?!

Media Awareness Test (slogan game)

The breakfast of champions ___________________
The copper-topped battery ___________________
The nighttime, sniffing, sneezing, coughing, aching, stuffy head, fever, so you can rest medicine ___________________
It just keeps going, and going, and going ___________________
The softer side of ___________________
The best part of waking up is ___________________ in your cup.
Good to the last drop ___________________
In the valley of the jolly (ho-ho-ho-) ___________________
Melts in your mouth, not in your hands ___________________
Best for you and all your 2000 parts ___________________
Just Do It ___________________
Kid tested, Mother approved ___________________
Must see TV ___________________
Always low prices, always ___________________
Nothing runs like a ___________________, John ___________________
Be all that you can be, in the ___________________
Yo Quiero? ___________________
Did somebody say? ___________________
It’s got to be the ___________________
It’s the cheesiest ___________________
You look so natural, no one can tell ___________________
The fastest way to send money ___________________
They care enough to send the very best ___________________
5 cents a day, every day ___________________
mmm mmm good ___________________
bargains by the bagful ___________________

Answer Key to media awareness test (slogan game)
Wheaties
Duracell
Nyquil
Energizer
Sears
Folgers
Maxwell House Coffee
Green Giant
M & M’s
Lever 2000
Nike
Kix
NBC
Walmart
Deere, John Deere

Week One: Advertising Unit

DAY ONE: (50 minutes)

Statistic on overhead: Teens see approximately 3,000 of these a day.

• Have students guess what this statistic could be referencing
  

• After guessing, and coming up with the answer, ask students if they think this is possible.
  

• Where could 3000 ads be seen per day?
  

• Have students look around the room and count the amount of ads they see; highest count gets prize.

Coke vs. Pepsi

• Familiar topic to all; when you think of Coke, what do you think?
  

• When you think of Pepsi, what do you think?
  

• What is your preference of drink? / Why?
  

• Do you think that the advertisements have an effect on you?
  

• If they don’t have an effect on the population, then why are they spending millions of dollars on these advertisements?
  

• Look at comparison of bottles. What are the differences? Why?
  

• Look at comparison of images being sold by each product. What audience is each targeting? Website transparency used and commercial transparency.

DAY TWO: (30 minutes)

Start with slogan guessing game. Have students guess the slogan. The preface: students stated yesterday that advertising does not effect them, yet they are able to identify over 20 slogans in less than a second. (10 minutes)

Discuss different types of propaganda techniques. (10 minutes)

Show short video that uses persuasive technique and have students identify several techniques used in video (pitch for stadium in St. Paul). (10 minutes)

DAY THREE: (50 minutes)

Students read the first two viewpoints of article and discuss as a group what was covered in the article. (not extremely successful. Need shorter article). (10 minutes)

Summarize what was covered yesterday; propaganda techniques in video, etc. Place propaganda techniques back on board and look at specific ads, discussing different types of techniques used. (20 minutes)

Have students look through magazines in search of ads that sell an image more than the product. Share with class as they go. (20 minutes)

DAY FOUR:

Show the “Best Commercials of All Time” to students and have them identify at least three propaganda techniques used in the commercials. Short response paragraph also to follow the identified propaganda techniques. (50 minutes)

Week Two: Advertising Unit

DAY ONE: (50 minutes) ADS SELL IMAGE

• Place Corporate Alphabet on the overhead. How many do you recognize?
  

• How many of you still think that we are not affected by advertising?

• Discuss this statement: Ads sell ideas, not products.

• We look at more ads on the overhead, and students study/respond to what the ad is saying. What techniques are being used?
  

• Questions to be answered when examining an ad:
  ~ What do you notice first?
  ~ What information is given about the product?
  ~ What is shown as important to the image?
  ~ What is the lifestyle or fantasy being promoted?
  ~ What is the message of the ad?
  

• Hand out worksheet one and have students fill in the first two rows.

• Do you think that many of your peers share the same desires?
  

• Students get in groups of four and create a thesis statement for their group: What, as a group do you value most? Find ads that correspond with such desires. Volunteers share with the group what ads they found that correspond with their desires.

• Hand out worksheet two for the homework of the evening, due tomorrow.

DAY TWO: (50 minutes) PERSUASION

• Pose this question to students at the beginning of class and write down responses on an overhead/or chalkboard:

• Think of a time when you wanted to convince your parent to let you do something. What did you do to persuade him or her?

• Discuss how propaganda surrounds our life in many ways, from the advertising pitches that we are bombarded by, to the way in which we try to pitch our own beliefs and expressions.

• Hand out Worksheet Five and read through with the students. Ask if they have questions about the handout. Give an example of the three types of persuasion/argumentation on the overhead. Discuss.

• Have students provide a short pitch for different products using the three basic concepts. Partners share with the other the three pitches and the other partner has to guess which technique was used. Both partners share “pitches.”

• Volunteers for the class share their pitches with the class.
  

• Hand out persuasive word sheet used for ads.

DAY THREE: (50 minutes) AD BUSTING:

QUOTATION: Thaw with his gentle persuasion is more powerful than Thor with his hammer. The one melts, the other but breaks in pieces. ATTRIBUTION: Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862), U.S. philosopher, author, naturalist

QUOTATION: The object of oratory (speaking) alone is not truth, but persuasion. ATTRIBUTION: Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800–1859)

Cialdini found that successful counter ads involve the use of effective counter-arguments that call into question the opponent's facts and trustworthiness. Memory links to the opponent's ads, a sponging device which essentially infects the opponent's message by linking its memory and impact to the counter ad. Ridicule is used to satirize the opponent's ads.

An example of a successful ad campaign that involved all of these elements was the anti-smoking campaign some years ago that featured mock "Marlboro Man" commercials. Those commercials initially looked like tobacco ads, with the same rugged outdoor settings and same macho cowboy characters. But the counter ads then transformed into attacks on tobacco, depicting the cowboys coughing and displaying other health symptoms that result from smoking. This undermined the original ads, as Cialdini said, the satirical ads made laughable the notion that smoking was linked to images of male strength and potency.

What is the meaning of the word satire? One way to combat persuasion is through the use of satire.

SATIRE: A satire, either in speaking or in writing, holds prevailing vices or foolishness up to ridicule: it employs humor and wit to criticize human institutions or humanity itself, in order that they may be remodeled or removed.

Here is one example of satire . . . there are thousands of examples online. (Check out The Onion, or even the Minnesota Daily archives on-line)...

Show spoof ads; begin discussing with students the ads they will be pitching after spring break. What is the purpose of a spoof ad?

We read the article “Sweet 16” from the AdBusters magazine.

What do you think of this article?

***To illustrate other “persuasion” examples, and just for fun (the kids really enjoy these!!):

(With hands on shoulders) Oh, those are shoulder blades, I thought they were wings.
 
If I could be anything I'd be a tear: Born in your eye, live on your cheek, and die at your lips.
 
"Would you happen to have a band-aid, because I skinned my knee when I fell for you."

DAY FOUR: Present the assignment for spring break: The CONTEST!!!

We look at more bad ads. Show the Chevy ad again.

There is a distinction between commercials, which are broadcast on television, radio, and other electronic media, and advertisements, which are found in various print media, such as magazines, newspapers, billboards and posters. (On the Internet, the many static advertisements are, I would suggest, best seen as electronically disseminated print advertisements.) The following checklist focuses on print advertisements; Chapter 6 provides a checklist for analyzing television commercials.

The Mood

What is the general audience of the advertisement — the mood that is created, the feelings it stimulates?

The Design

What is the basic design of the advertisement? Does it use axial balance, or are the fundamental units arranged in an asymmetrical manner?

What relationship exists between the pictorial aspects of the advertisement and the copy, or written material?

How is spatiality used in the advertisement? Is there lots of white (blank) space, or is the advertisement crowded — full of written and graphic material?

Is there a photograph used in the advertisement? If so, what kind of shot is it? What angle is it taken from? What is the lighting like? How is color used?

The Context and Content

If there are figures in the advertisement (people, animals), what are they like? Consider factors (to the extent that you can) such as facial expressions, hairstyles and hair color, body shape and body language, clothes, age, sex, race, ethnicity, education, occupation, relationships, and so on.

What does the background of the figures suggest? Where is the action taking place, and how does the background relate to this action?

What is going on in the advertisement, and what significance does this action have? Assuming that the advertisement represents part of a narrative, what can we conclude about what has led to this particular moment in time? That is, what is the plot?

Signs and Symbols

What symbols and signs appear in the advertisement? What role do they play in stimulating positive feelings about or desire for the product or service being advertised?

Language and Typefaces

How is language used in the advertisement? What linguistic devices provide information or generate some hoped-for emotional response? Does the advertisement used metaphor? Metonomy? Repetition? Alliteration? Comparison and contrast? Sexual innuendo? Definitions?

What typefaces are used, and what messages do these typefaces convey?

Themes

What are the basic themes in the advertisement? What is the advertisement about (for example, the plot may involve a man and a woman drinking, and the theme may be jealousy)? What product or service is being advertised? What role does it play in American society and culture?

What political, economic, social, and cultural attitudes are reflected in the advertisement-such as alienation, sexism, conformity, anxiety, stereotyped thinking, generational conflict, obsession, elitism, loneliness, and so on?

What information do you need to make sense of the advertisement? Does it allude to certain beliefs? Is it a reflection of a certain lifestyle? Does it assume information and knowledge on the part of a person looking at the advertisement?

Hand out worksheet 7 and worksheet 8 to help them recognize “techniques.”

More examples of persuasion that gets the kids to think outside of the advertising “box” — and they really get a kick out of them!

• Hey baby, are you a parking ticket? 'Cause you got "fine" written all over you!
  

• Can I borrow your library card? I wanna check you out!
  

• Are you from Tennessee? 'Cause Ten is all I See!
  

• Are your feet tired? 'Cause you've been running through my mind all day.
  

• Are you Jamaican? 'Cause you're Jamaican me crazy!
  

• Do you have a map? Because I'm totally lost in your eyes.
  

• Well, here I am. What were your other two wishes?
  

• I bet you 20 bucks you're gonna turn me down.

What is the point of persuasion? What makes someone a good persuader? A poor persuader? What types of persuasion work best on you? Examples: humor, honesty, argument, etc. Why might it be difficult to turn down someone who's trying to persuade you to do something?

Module 6: Word document

A Broader Definition of Advertising Instruction

Advertising Drives Content

Why Study Ads?

Application of Semiotic Analysis to Ads

Rhetorical/Audience Analysis of Ads

Critical Discourse Analysis of Ads

Advertising as Propaganda: Public Relations Ads

Advertising and Idealized Gender Images

Advertising and Alcohol/Tobacco

Advertising and the Pharmaceutical Industry

Advertising on the Web

Marketing in Schools

Political Advertising

Product Placements

Creating or Parodying Ads

References

Teaching Activities