Our students represent a lucrative target audience. Companies bombard them daily with ads through every possible venue, so much so that most advertising is now an integral, barely noticed part of the American landscape.
And there's the rub. Barely noticed, yet there, exerting a powerful influence on how children choose to buy, think, and act.
In previous posts I've discussed
persuasive writing (
Convince Me: Real-Life Uses for Persuasive Writing and
So What’s Your Point? Persuasive Writing Using Picture Books) as well as
financial literacy (
Dollars and Sense for Students). Now Scholastic has teamed up with the Federal Trade Commission to combine these two ideas, plus the concept of
media literacy, to produce the
Admongo site and its
related teacher resources.
The FTC site explains that
Advertising is a multi-million dollar business. Truthful advertising provides benefits to consumers and competition. It gives consumers the information they need to make better-informed purchasing and product use decisions. It also gives companies an incentive to modify their products to provide features that customers want. By contrast, false advertising interferes with decision-making and hinders competition.
Tweens have their own money to spend, and parents report that children play an important role in family buying decisions. Because kids are an important part of the marketplace, they often are the targets of advertising and marketing programs. The result is that American kids see ads wherever they go.
The four components of the campaign (a
game-based website at Admongo.gov,
sample ads that can be used in the classroom; a
free curriculum, and teacher training videos) are designed to help students learn to ask three key "critical thinking" questions when they encounter advertising:
- Who is responsible for the ad?
- What is the ad actually saying?
- What does the ad want me to do?
While I personally used authentic ads that children know (and strangely love), I appreciate that this program offers fictitious yet genuine-looking ads and videos for classroom discussion. The advantage to the fake ads is that children can't assume they know the product
I'm switching gears today and working on a kid's book for Annick Press here in Canada. I'll leave you with some panels from Adventures Of The Flying Boat. I'm hoping to have some publishing news to share in the next couple of weeks.
This is the chapter head for my new Harry And Silvio project. The name of this first chapter is The Cloud Cave. I've finished all the initial inks on the 14 page chapter and am now going to go back and do revisions which largely consists of going back and forth between black and white inks. It should all be done this weekend.
For the first time in over a year I feel like I solidly know what I'm doing over the next 4 to 6 months. I have three projects on the go. It actually feels really good to be making things again and not wheel spinning. I just sent off the contract to Annick Press, a Canadian publisher, to do a new picture book. More on that later. Also, I'll be serializing a comic on Tor's website with writer Jeff Vandermeer. That's that amazing Situation project I've talked about before. And finally I'll be working on this Harry and Silvio story. I'm not sure how I'll proceed with that. I envision a story of about 120 150 pages. Next week I'll be sending it out to publishers. If it doesn't get picked up I'll continue to publish it as a minicomic and perhaps ass a webcomic. I may do this if it is picked up. We'll see, I guess.
Anyway, that's my next few months. I have to go now. Henry is poking the keyboard....
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That´awesome!
Good luck for you.
Hugs.