ADVERTISING AWARENESS PART ONE

Part One of a five part language-social studies unit for years 5-8+ exploring the world and language of advertising including purposes, methods, targets and our reactions to advertising.

Teacher Hint: This is a great excuse to decorate your class with advertising posers and brochures to make a really colourful display and stimulate interest in the unit.

Click here for part two of - Advertising Awareness:

THE TARGET AUDIENCE CONCEPT

Why Do We Advertise

Initiate a class discussion on the purposes of advertising. Why do people and businesses advertise? Have any students advertised anything? How? Groups present answers to the class.

Where do we find Advertising

Give groups the task of brainstorming and investigating where advertising can be found. Make a master list. Add to this during the duration of the unit as the students become more aware of subtle forms of advertising such as: T Shirts, Shopping Bags, Buses and Cars as well as the more obvious mediums.

Love and hate Relationship?

Have each student identify their favourite TV advertisement and their 'most hated' TV advertisement. Each student must write a short paragraph giving their reasons for their choices. Present to the class. Gather the scripts and make into two class booklets for shared reading.

Target Audience

Make a master chart of the love and hate advertisements for the class to analyse. They may be surprised to find that many of the same advertisements appear on both sides of the chart. Why is this so?

Introduce the idea of a target audience. Tell students that it is often said that 'if you don't like an advertisement then you are not the target audience'. Can they think of any particular attributes of certain advertisements that would not appeal to different audiences and why not, eg 'the rap/bebop music background would not appeal to parents but would appeal to 8-13 year olds'.

Community/Family Survey

Reproduce the 'love/hate master sheet in A4 size and have students conduct community and family surveys to find other reactions to the advertisements chosen. Have the survey audience also suggest advertisments that could be included in each category. Find out why they love or hate a particular advertisement.

Analyse the Results

In groups, have the students collate and record their results in a suitable form, eg a table, chart etc.

The challenge now is to collate the survey results to give meaning. Questions to ask could be…

• Are there certain advertisements that appeal to different age groups
• Are there advertisements that appeal to different genders?
• Are their advertisements that appeal only to young or teenage children?
• Are there advertisements that appeal only to people with certain occupations or hobbies?
  

Through careful analysis and discussion, lead the students to see that certain advertisements will have an appeal to certain target audiences. Challenge the students to:

• group the advertisements in to categories, eg food, investment, travel, communication
• identify the target audience for each category of advertisement.
• write short statements giving reasons why a particular advertisement will appeal to a certain target audience.

Extra for Experts

Older students may like to speculate on who will make the spending decisions for purchasing any article or servcice that is advertised. Do they as students have any say in the purcashing decisions? How?

Click here for part two of - Advertising Awareness: