Safer Internet Day is an annual event, held this year on February 9th, which is observed in nations around the world. This year’s theme is “Think Before You Click.” Here are some MNet resources that teachers and parents can use to children and youth adopt ethical and responsible online habits:

Lessons

Classroom Resources to Counter Cyberbullying (various grade levels)

Free Speech Versus the Internet (Grades 10-12)

Promoting Ethical Behaviour Online (Grades 7-9)

 

Educational Games

Privacy Playground: The First Adventure of the Three CyberPigs (Ages 8-10)

Cybersense and Nonsense: The First Adventure of the Three CyberPigs (Ages 9-12)

Jo Cool or Jo Fool (Grades 6-8)

Passport to the Internet (Grades 4-8) Licensed resource

 

It’s a safe bet that if the average Canadian knows anything about the business of advertising, it’s because of Terry O’Reilly’s CBC Radio show The Age of Persuasion. O’Reilly, along with his collaborator (and co-author of this book) Mike Tennant, has been producing material on advertising for the CBC since 1995, and his show has become a must-listen for anyone with an interest in advertising or the media in general. The Age of Persuasion: How Marketing Ate Our Culture, similarly, is a valuable resource both for those with a casual interest in marketing and for teachers of media education.

In the book’s introduction, O’Reilly lays out his two purposes for the show: to look at the impact advertising has on our world – and vice-versa – and to correct the view of advertising as “a plague imposed on an innocent population by some big, bad marketing empire mothership.”

One great service O’Reilly performs in the book is to explain the difference between how we think advertising works and how it really does work. Most people think of advertising as a means of communicating a message: here is the product, here are its virtues, this is why you should buy it. This is, in fact, how advertising once used to work, until the fateful day in 1904 when advertising innovator (and former Mountie) John Ernest Kennedy changed the rules. “Until then the pioneers of advertising had simply invited or implored readers to visit their shops and buy their products… In Kennedy’s view, it was about giving people a ‘reason why’ they should purchase a product.” Kennedy’s “reason why,” though, was not a rational one: it was an emotional reason. “No longer was it enough for an ad simply to appear in print; the content of an ad, the imagery it presented, the feeling it stirred… were now recognized as vital components of success.”

This revolution in advertising eventually led to the more subtle art of branding: the creation of an identity for a product, as though it were a person with whom consumers could form a relationship. (The 20th century can be looked at as the age in which companies became humans: corporations were granted legal status as persons and their products acquired personalities.) Here is how O’Reilly describes branding at work: “I always ask new clients about their ‘brand story.’ I want to know the tale they’ve been weaving as a company to this point in time. I want to get a sense of the tonality, the history of the brand over the years, the quality of their storytelling. Because a brand is a kind of character, and every character has a story. And stories are irresistible.”

O’Reilly gives a particularly vivid example of the power of branding related to that most iconic of brands, Coca-Cola: “In a taste test once, the iconic drink was compared to an undisclosed cola. People chose Coke over the mystery item almost a hundred to one. Then the undisclosed soda was revealed: it was, in fact, Coke… When people sampled Coke, they not only tasted the sugar and water combination; they also tasted the logo and the imagery, commercials, and promotions that have accompanied the drink for decades.”

But while for Coke the logo may be more important than the taste, other companies manipulate their sensory qualities to strengthen their brands: Kellogg’s, for instance, hired a consultant to make its “snap, crackle and pop” more distinctive, while Rolls-Royce sprays each of its cars with the scent of wood, leather and wool – all the things their cars are no longer made of. It’s hard to think of a better way of convincing skeptics of the power of advertising and branding.

Another valuable thing O’Reilly does in the book is to communicate the power of consumers relative to advertisers. He does this by suggesting the relationship between advertisers and audiences is actually a contract: we accept ads in order to enjoy the things that they pay for: commercial TV and radio, magazines and newspapers, and so on. If advertisers violate this contract, O’Reilly suggests, they will suffer for it – but only if consumers stand up for their rights under the contract. “It’s well past time for advertisers to be held to the terms of the great unwritten contract. But that can happen only if you familiarize yourself with the terms of the contract and apply it to the ads you see, hear, and otherwise experience…. Don’t believe for a moment that you can’t make a difference: a handful of complaints can – and do – derail multimillion-dollar ad campaigns.”

Valuable though this book is, it does have a few flaws. To begin with, O’Reilly takes a somewhat naïve stand when it comes to truth in advertising. He recounts an episode from the 1960s that, to his mind, shows that deception in advertising will invariably fail: “A team with the ad agency BBDO New York was trying to get a product shot of Campbell’s vegetable soup… The team dropped in some marbles, which raised the vegetables to the top. The stunt resulted in a probe by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission… Campbell’s – and its ad agency – didn’t get away with the deception. I believe that few advertisers – if any – do.” Perhaps because of his roots in radio, O’Reilly seems to be unaware of the legions of “food stylists” who do exactly what he is describing to make products look their best. A look at this slide show in The Guardian, or the two blogs from which it drew its content, shows at a glance the gulf between advertising and reality when it comes to food:

 

 

(Top, a Subway six-inch turkey breast and ham sub as depicted in the chain’s advertising; below, the same sandwich in reality.)

The second flaw is more of a sin of omission, in that the book spends very little time on advertising in new media. That’s not surprising – again, given O’Reilly’s roots in radio advertising, perhaps the most old-school of media – but with the increasing importance of the Internet in our lives, and the generally unregulated nature of online advertising, it’s disappointing. Although one chapter looks at viral advertising, it focuses on the posting of ads, parodies and consumer complaints on YouTube, essentially looking at how old-media products (TV commercials) work differently on a new platform. The entire panoply of Internet-native advertising – from behavioural marketing to embedded ads to advergames to branded environments – goes unmentioned.

This is particularly unfortunate when it comes to advertising targeted at youth: while O’Reilly suggests that youth are “turning away from traditional advertising-driven media, disappearing into the electronic version of gated communities as they hunker down in front of their computers, putting up fences that most marketers haven’t yet learned to scale,” our study Young Canadians in a Wired World showed that ninety-five percent of young Internet users’ favourite sites contained advertising content. Moreover, recent research into youth media use has shown that youth aren’t abandoning old media for new. While traditional forms of advertising are in decline – witness, for instance, the drop in price of Super Bowl ads, traditionally the most expensive advertising slot – it’s not because youth are watching less TV. Instead they’re consuming more than one medium at the same time, multiplying their advertising exposure. 

It is in addressing youth advertising that the book is weakest, as O’Reilly promotes the idea that young people are “increasingly immune to conventional marketing messages.” This is a widely held view – particularly among youth themselves, who will often vociferously deny that advertising has any effect on them while at the same time wearing a half-dozen brand logos and working long hours to be able to afford the latest cool gadget – but there is no evidence to show that it is true. O’Reilly says that “Young people have become adept at seeing through the sales language advertisers have honed for more than a century, and they’re media savvy enough to know how the marketing machine works.” Research, however, consistently shows that youth are vulnerable to advertising; for instance, this 2009 study by the Nova Scotia Department of Health Promotion and Protection found a relationship between young people’s exposure to alcohol advertising and how early they began to drink and how much they drank. Further, youth are not necessarily even very skilled at recognizing advertising when they see it: Young Canadians in a Wired World showed that two-thirds of those children who played advergames (online games which contain branded content) considered them “just games” and not advertising.

Young people may have become more suspicious of advertising, as they are about the media in general, but it is important not to mistake cynicism for skepticism: youth still very much need to be taught the tricks, techniques, and most importantly the genuine purpose of advertising and branding. Despite its (relatively minor) flaws, this book is a valuable resource for teachers working to do just that.

MNet Resources

You can read previous Talk Media blogs dealing with advertising by clicking here.

Teachers can also browse our free online Lesson Library; a complete list of resources relating to advertising is here.   

Teachers can help junior grade students (ages 5-8) recognize and decode online advertising by having them play our free educational game Co-Co’s Adversmarts. For students in Grades 6-8 there’s our quiz on alcohol advertising, The Target is You!

Concerned parents can visit our section on Marketing and Consumerism to get help on teaching their kids how to deal with food marketing, advertising guidelines, self-image issues and the tricks advertisers use to reach kids and build brand loyalty – as well as tips on how you and your children can take action by voicing your opinion to the advertising industry, countering the commercialization of education and raising awareness in your school or community.

If anyone still doubts that youth need to learn how to evaluate online information, those doubts should have been dispelled by a recent hoax perpetrated by the group called the Yes Men. This group, which has a history of staging fake press conferences, decided to draw attention to Canada's position at the Copenhagen conference on climate change by creating a number of fake Web sites purporting to be, among others, the Copenhagen summit site, the Wall Street Journal, and Environment Canada's site. While it didn't take long for Environment Canada to make a statement exposing the hoax, by that time many journalists had reported the story as fact and the story had been widely distributed by wire services.



If professional journalists can't recognize a hoax of this kind, is it fair to expect students to be able to judge the material they find online? The fact is that there were a number of steps that reporters could have taken, and tools they could have used, to check the accuracy of this story -- steps and tools that are available to anyone.
 
The first thing that should have raised a red flag was the URLs or Web addresses of the sites. The fake Environment Canada site's URL was www.enviro-canada.ca, compared to the real Web address which is www.ec.gc.ca (all Government of Canada Web sites end in "gc.ca.") While a student might not know this (though one would expect a reporter to), one easily available clue that there was something wrong with the URL was the fact that the actual site's URL was listed at the top of the page, under the Environment Canada logo. As well, all of the links on the page (which the Yes Men copied from the actual site for verisimilitude) lead to pages on the real site. In other words, every URL associated with the site except the site's “main page” have the "gc.ca" suffix.

One of the cleverest aspects of the hoax was that it did not rely just on a single fake site to get its message out. To make the story more convincing, the hoaxers created fake sites for the Copenhagen summit, and the Wall Street Journal that reported their story as fact. This shows the dark side of the notion of "reliable sources": many other journalists who covered the story quite likely gave it credence because they thought it had appeared in the Journal, a newspaper with a nearly impeccable reputation. Indeed, when Environment Canada released a statement condemning the hoax and complaining that many news sources had fallen for it, the example they gave (and linked to) was the fake Wall Street Journal story. The Journal site was a very convincing spoof, but again the URL was a clue to its true nature. Here, though, the Yes Men had been particularly clever: they chose to spoof the Journal's Europe page rather than the main page, most likely thinking readers would be less likely to recognize that their URL (www.europe-wsj.com) was not the correct one (www.europe.wsj.com.)



What else might have given these fake sites away? One useful tool is to conduct a link search. While it's easy enough for a spoof site to copy outgoing links, as the Yes Men did on both the Environment Canada and Wall Street Journal sites, it's harder to reproduce the links that lead to a page from other sites. By using the link: operator in a search engine such as Google, we can see that there are no sites linking into www.europe-wsj.com, while more than 3,000 sites link to www.europe.wsj.com. Another valuable tool is the Alexa Web site, which provides statistics on Web site traffic and allows you to determine how long a Web site has been in existence; for instance, the www.enviro-canada.ca site had no traffic whatsoever before December 7th, while the English home page of the Environment Canada Web site has had consistent traffic going back as far as Alexa reports it (though visits naturally spiked in December.) Similarly, the Twitter account that purported to belong to Minister of the Environment Jim Prentice -- with which he apparently confirmed the press release -- only came into being on December 11th. (Twitter should never be considered a reliable source, of course, given how easy it is to create fake accounts.)

None of these steps or tools of course, is of any value if they're not used. What's most important is to develop a healthy skepticism towards every source you might use. In pre-Internet days it may have been enough to check the credentials of a supposed authority; now, as we've seen, the ease of publishing a convincing fake online means you can't even assume that source is who it claims to be. Instead we have to develop habits of mind that will let us spot indications that something is unreliable. One example on the false Environment Canada site would be the fact that the press release is not available in French (an odd oversight, given the Yes Men's otherwise very thorough approach.) A bigger clue is simply the unlikelihood that the Canadian government would reverse its position to that degree on this issue. Of course, this was what made it such a good story, but that's no excuse for not doing the due diligence of investigating your sources.

With the number of media outlets available to us today, and the ease with which people can create and distribute material on the Internet, it's important that all of us develop critical filters and habits of mind. Even for journalists, who are trained to be skeptical, it's easy to cut corners (for instance, assuming that the various fake sites created by the Yes Men corroborated one another.) The time is past when we could trust a news outlet to judge for us whether something is true or not: for good or ill, we all must now learn and exercise the investigative skills of good journalism ourselves.