Time to Ad Up!

Objectives

• Realize the influence that advertising exerts on our lives;
• Recognize advertising strategies used to sell products.

Description

Working in teams, students create a promotional poster or and advertisement for a product. They learn to recognize advertising strategies by incorporating content elements.

Equipment

• Arts and craft supplies;
• Poster board;
• Pictures of products;
• Newspapers or magazines.

Introduction

Ask students to name a promotional poster or radio ad they can remember. You can also show them ads (sourced from a magazine or elsewhere) and ask them to say which ones they prefer.

Ask students to explain why they like or remember these ads. Get students to name the advertising strategies that advertisers use so that people like their ads.

Explanations

Among the many strategies that advertisers use, the following eight are particularly popular :

Using a spokesperson : Backed by his or her popularity or credibility, a spokesperson encourages consumers to follow his or her example and buy the product.

Appealing to emotions : Ads present situations that may be distasteful, funny, or sad—sometimes with no apparent link to the advertised product. Eliciting an emotional reaction increases consumer interest in the ad and gets them to remember the product.

Idealized lifestyles : Ads often show an ideal world where people have perfect bodies, a balanced life, a close-knit family, and so on. Consumers can easily believe that what they are seeing represents the norm. This advertising strategy may give consumers the impression that the product will have a direct impact on their life. By buying it, consumers can be more like the people in the ad, since the product will improve their health, make them happy, give them more time with their family, etc.

Popularity as bait : Advertisements can convince consumers that the product is synonymous with popularity. Buying the advertised product will make the consumer stand out, be envied by his or her entourage, attract new friends, and be accepted into higher profile groups.

Comparisons with competitors : The advertiser compares its product with the most popular competing brand to highlight its benefits. However, watch out for false statements or misrepresentation! Any statement in an ad must be true and verifiable.

Testimonials : Whether actors or not, the people in these ads are always happy to reveal how satisfied they are with the product they bought. Consumers are led to believe that they, too, have every chance of being just as satisfied.

Facts and statistics : By presenting the product features, how or where it was designed, and interesting statistics, the advertiser can convince consumers that the product is everything they need. Especially if this information is provided by an expert!

Memorization : Puns or plays on words, slogans, jingles, and the repetition of visual or audio elements are all good ways to get consumers to think about the product and the brand and to make sure they remember it.

Instructions

Students get together in teams of two or three. The teacher proposes actual or fictional products (photos, drawings, verbal suggestions) to the students. He or she can let each team choose a different product or can impose a common product for all teams to show the different approaches to a same topic. The students must create a promotional poster or an advertisement. The ad must include the product name, brand, a slogan, and a price, in addition to using one or more of the advertising strategies presented. The product picture must also be used for the posters.

Instructions for promotional poster	Instructions for advertisement
With the arts and crafts supplies, drawings, or a collage made from old magazines or newspapers, teams must create a promotional poster and specify where it would be displayed. Teams can go through magazines and newspapers to find ideas and reuse material.	Using the product picture, teams must design a 30-second radio ad to sell the product.   The teams must decide the content to be included as well as the soundscape and intonation.

When the ads are finished, the teams present their creative work to the class. The rest of the class determines which advertising strategy or strategies were used by the presenting team.

Conclusion

Question students find out which strategies they chose and discuss the most popular strategies for the presentations and why. Ask them :

• What other strategies can be used but were not mentioned during the activity?
• What should a good ad contain?
• Why might it be useful to be able to decode advertising strategies (to avoid getting drawn in too easily, to be a critical thinker, etc.)?