Are You Being Tricked?: How Ads Are Persuading You

🤔Do you really want the product, or are you just being tricked into wanting it? 🤔

🧠Want your child to be a critical consumer? Then this is the class for you!

This class will use market research and rhetorical analysis to help students decipher whether they want a product or are being sold by tricky marketing. This four-week course will address how marketers can trick you with embedded marketing, brand loyalty, and many other techniques. While some techniques are new, others are ancient. We will learn about Aristotle's rhetorical proofs and how modern marketing still applies those persuasive techniques today. The course ends with the students creating their own advertisements!

The class will discuss marketing and communication concepts in an accessible way by using games and discussions and getting students to analyze ads of products they have seen. Reviewing the advertisements, we will discuss how the marketers adapt to their audience. What do kids like, and how are marketers using that to convince them to buy their product?

Class Overview:

1st Class: What is an advertisement? You might be surprised to find out. We learn about embedded marketing, product placement, and how companies use influencers, movies, video games, and many other media to advertise their products to create brand loyalty and recognition. We also learn about why brand loyalty and recognition become huge factors in what we buy.

2nd Class: Tricks of the Trade: What are common tactics advertisers use to trick you? We learn about filming techniques, music, humor, distraction, and other ways advertisers get you to want a product. We play a game called "Guess the Product?" where an ad is played without sound. Students often cannot guess the product because there are so many other distracting elements in the ad.

3rd Class: Ancient Techniques: We learn about Aristotle and his theory of Rhetorical Proofs. We learn about Ethos, Pathos, Logos, and how these persuasive methods are still used today. We play the game "Guess the Proof" to see if students can identify the rhetorical proof used in the different ads shown.

4th Class: Let's Apply the Information! For our last class, we apply everything we learned and create our own advertisements. We create an advertising plan for a product they currently own. What media would we use to apply embedded marketing? What techniques might we use to make the product more appealing? Then we create a mini pitch using ethos, pathos, and logos and create a rhetorical masterpiece!