ADVERTISING TO CHILDREN

Lesson Plan: Cereal Boxes

 

Learning Objectives: Recognizing advertising intent and product placement.

Products are well-designed to appeal to a certain audience. They are made especially recognizable to their target audience and the features listed include values assumed to be those of the audience.

 

The exterior marketing too is designed with the audience in mind. In stores, fiber-rich cereals marketed to adults line the higher shelves, while brightly-colored boxes filled with sugary cereals are placed at a child’s eye level.

 

Resources:

Cereal Boxes PowerPoint. Includes the two images discussed, a photo of a typical cereal aisle, and photos of children’s cereal boxes.

Cereal Boxes Worksheet: a simple pre-formatted worksheet for the activity.

 

Activity Setup: Have each student bring their favorite cereal to school, bring an assortment, or use the provided sample photos.

 

Discussion

Show the students the provided cereal box designs and discuss the following questions:

 

Which cereal would you rather eat? Discuss why children might (or might not!) gravitate to the brightly-colored box with a recognizable TV character on it.

 

Which one do you think your mom or dad would choose? Focus on how different audiences have different preferences and values even in the cereal they eat, and how advertisers design boxes with that in mind.

 

Which cereal box do you think you could find faster at the store?
Where would it be?
Where would the other box be? Here discuss product placement—how where it is physically in a store affects who sees it and who might notice it.

 

Do you know who is on the second cereal box? Many children will recognize the character, and some might be regular watchers of the TV show.

 

A lot of cereal boxes have pictures of cartoon or movie characters. (Optional: show included gallery in Cereal Boxes PowerPoint)

 

Why do you think the people who sell cereal use cartoon or movie characters? Do you think it works? Here you discuss advertiser motive and the effect on audience.

 

Have you seen any other characters on snack packages? Does SpongeBob eat cereal (or any of the other characters, for that matter)? Make students recognize that a cartoon character really has nothing to do with cereal.  Why should s/he be on a cereal package? This relates to one of the three types of advertising—association, however tenuous, with a well-known character.

 

Who pays for these boxes to be made?  Do you think they pay SpongeBob or does SpongeBob pay them? Why? Why would Nickelodeon pay to have SpongeBob’s picture on a box?  Here we want students to begin to grasp the uncomfortable concept that audiences are the product sold to advertisers; it’s less clear in this instance because the audience also pays, but future lessons make a clearer connection.

 

Activity:

Bring out the sample cereal boxes or photos.  Ask students for a few observations on the use of advertising on them. See if any obviously target different audiences, and discuss why that might be.

 

Give each student the Cereal Box Worksheet and have them design their own cereal box. Have them identify their audience and explain why this design would make someone want to buy their cereal.