CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — The Super Bowl will feature car ads, beer ads, food ads – but probably none for carrots. Most food ads, game time or anytime, are pitching less-healthy fare.
Kids are often the target. Do they understand what an ad is? Who made it and why?
It’s basic “advertising literacy,” and yet it’s missing for too many children at a vulnerable age, according to a University of Illinois researcher who implemented a third-grade ad literacy curriculum for the Waukegan, Illinois, public schools and recently published a study on its effect.
Advertising professor Michelle Nelson sought to design a curriculum that incorporated nutrition along with math, language, arts and ad making – some of those ads selling kids on carrots.
In testing beforehand, Nelson was surprised to find that a third or fewer students understood the selling intent behind advertising (who made it and why), the target audience, or the tactics used to persuade. But she also learned that even a few hours of ad literacy instruction could make a significant difference, roughly doubling students’ awareness in key areas.
Nelson teaches advertising students and sees the value of ads for providing information and entertainment in the marketplace. Advertising also seeks to persuade, however, and the playing field between the ad makers and their audience is not always level, especially where children are involved or when new forms of persuasion emerge, she said.
“I think that all audiences should be able to recognize when they’re being persuaded. They should be able to recognize something is an ad,” she said. “The fact that many of these students didn’t seem to have even that level of understanding makes them more vulnerable, I suspect, to persuasive messages.”
Nelson described her project and the results in an article for the Journal of Advertising, considered a flagship journal in the field. The article was published online and is scheduled for a print issue of the journal later this year.
Her partner on the project was Dale Kehr, a U. of I. Extension educator for Lake and McHenry counties. The curriculum was taught and tested in spring 2014 by the regular teachers in six third-grade classrooms, with four other classrooms used as controls – their students tested, but without the instruction.
The curriculum was developed in part to fulfill nutrition curriculum requirements for a federal grant the school district received to address childhood obesity.
Many school programs have been developed to address that issue, focusing on nutrition, Nelson said. This curriculum also teaches those lessons, but through the lens of advertising, giving kids needed tools for processing the vast majority of food ads pitching fast food, soft drinks and other less-healthy options.
“Those are the ads that we see the most and so they’re sort of top of mind,” Nelson said. “The advertising dollars for fruits and vegetables are really tiny.”
The curriculum teaches kids to think critically about what they’re seeing and not seeing in ads. In one exercise, for instance, they examine claims on the front of the cereal box and see where they don’t pan out on the nutrition label.
But Nelson thinks it’s also important to have kids make ads to better understand the process and incorporate the lessons through doing – learning about advertising from the inside out. “In this day and age of media, you want kids to be media creators and engage with media, not just deal with it passively,” she said.
As part of her program with the Waukegan Public Schools, Nelson also conducted advertising literacy workshops in spring 2015 for teachers at all grade levels. Some of those teachers then developed their own food-focused lessons, she said.
Students made posters selling the benefits of fruits and vegetables. They gathered research, studied their target audience (mostly the kids in class), developed a message and an image. Some classes hung their posters in school lunchrooms. One teacher combined the exercise with a science project growing fruits and vegetables, and then asked the students to make advertisements for their produce.
“I feel this is a more authentic and true picture of advertising literacy – beyond simply identifying the advertisement,” Nelson said. “It shows them that this is how ads are made, this is who makes them, this is why.”
Nelson and her collaborators have collected a variety of materials from the classes, along with other resources, onto a public website titled “Making Media for a Healthier U” at http://makingmedia.media.illinois.edu. Included are links to media literacy programs developed in Canada and the United Kingdom, which Nelson thinks are more advanced than anything she has seen in the U.S.
The curriculum is not being taught this school year, but Nelson is continuing to work with the school district to further develop the project.
Editor’s notes: To reach Michelle Nelson, call 217-344-5068; email nelsonmr@illinois.edu.
The paper “Developing Persuasion Knowledge by Teaching Advertising Literacy in Primary School” is available from the Journal of Advertising at http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00913367.2015.1107871 (access may be restricted) or by contacting either Nelson or the News Bureau.
The teacher workshops were supported by a U. of I. public engagement grant.
