CLASSROOM:
Student
/ Teacher Activities | Student Links
| Teachers
| Model
Collage |
Collect
several magazines—fashion magazines are ideal, but any
publication will do.
- Review the advertisements and select examples that show
“real-looking” people, people who look like your
friends, parents, and teachers.
- Put those advertisements in one stack.
- Now review and select images of “beautiful”
people.
- Put those images in a different stack.
- Which were easier to find?
- Create a real life model by cutting and pasting different
parts of the selected ads until the models look more like
real people.
- You can also use markers to draw bigger arms, thicker
necks, etc. on the models.
- Next, create an advertisement for a product of your choice,
real or make believe, using parts of the advertisements
you selected.
- Analyze your final product.
- Did you select “real- looking” people to sell
your product?
- Why or why not?
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| Word
Collage |
Collect
magazines, review the advertisements, and find those that use
adjectives in the copy. - Put all of the positive words in
one stack and the negative words in another stack.
- Add these
words to the advertisement you created in the activity above,
or create a new advertisement using the words you have selected.
- Why did you choose the words you did? Analyze how language can
make viewers feel they need to buy a product.
- Next time you
see an advertisement, consider whether the words are designed
to make you feel good or bad about yourself.
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| Brains
or Beauty |
Watch
twenty nationally run commercials, those shown throughout the
country, rather than local commercials for establishments or
businesses in a particular city. - Examples of national commercials
include soft drink ads, fast food ads, and household products
commercials. Car commercials that advertise brands of cars are
national, but commercials for dealerships are local.
- After selecting
twenty advertisements, look at the leading actor male or female
in each commercial.
- Rate this actor’s appearance on a scale
of one to ten, with ten being extremely attractive. Beauty and
handsomeness are somewhat subjective categories, so rate the
actors on your gut reaction to their appearance.
- At the same
time, rate how intelligent or knowledgeable the actor appears
to be about the given subject matter, again on a scale of one
to ten.
- After completing this exercise for all twenty commercials,
determine the average rating for both categories.
- Which seems
to be more important in commercials beauty or intelligence?
- Discuss why this is true.
- As a class, make a graph showing the
relationship between attractiveness and intelligence on commercials.
- Discuss your method for determining how attractive and knowledgeable
the actors were.
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Other
great activities:
Beauty
Through the Ages
View
artwork on listed web sites and redo a chosen commercial based
on the standards of beauty and social values you feel the art
piece depicts.
What
You See Is What You Get
Gather
pictures of fast-food products from magazines and placemats
and compare them with real food items.
I Identify With That
Activity
covers the topic of supermodels in television advertising.
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