Adversmarts

Explain to students that to help you understand how companies advertise products to kids on the Internet, you are going to play a game where you help a cereal mascot – Co-Co – build a perfect website that kids will want to visit.

Have students access the student chapter Co-Co’s Adversmarts and play the game. (You may also choose to have the whole class play the game together using a data projector or a digital whiteboard.)

After students have finished the game, talk about the advertising strategies that were used to help Co-Co build his website and ask students to share which of these “tricks of the trade” they chose for Co-Co:

Examples of strategies used by marketers:

• Locations: Words like world, village, town, clubhouse, land and planet give the impression that the location of the website is set in a faraway special place. Companies want children to feel that it’s a special world and that they can have access to visit, play and explore.
• Personal: Words like my give the impression that the website is their own personal space. To reinforce this idea, these websites will also include activities in which kids can customize their experience. Some ask children to submit their names before entering a site in order to provide them with personalized greetings when they return.
• Adventure: Words like quest, challenge and journey give the impression that the user is about to begin a great adventure and give the sense that it is an active, rather than two dimensional, place. Sometimes these words are matched with a location, such as Adventure Land.

Then ask students:

How do companies try to convince children that a certain toy, game or cereal is really the best? What strategies do they use? Explain some of the strategies that marketers use to make children want to buy a particular product, such as:

• featuring kids who seem really “cool”
• featuring funny cartoon characters
• using sound effects, colour, dramatic camera angles and music to make the products in the ads look exciting
• showing everyone having a great time in the ads because they know people want to buy products that make them feel good