I write as a history and media analysis teacher with 10 years of experience in public and private middle and high schools. Currently, I teach a media analysis elective and an Advanced Placement U.S. history course at Albuquerque Academy, an independent school serving a diverse population of 1,000 students aged 11 to 18. I also am the director of curriculum for the New Mexico Media Literacy Project (NMMLP), a grassroots educational organization that promotes media education and activism among teachers, students, and interested citizens. We started 5 years ago as a local alliance, and today we have a mailing list of more than 10,000 subscribers, have done presentations and workshops for schools and community organizations all over the country, and have established professional relationships with a variety of health-related organizations, including the American Academy of Pediatrics. The New Mexico Media Literacy Project offers materials that may be of interest to literacy educators, including a “Just Do Media Literacy” film, an “Understanding Media” CD-ROM, and an activities guide; a K-12 curriculum guide will be available in fall 2000.

Rationale. Two years ago, in conjunction with California Newsreel and Consumer Reports' Zillions magazine, NMMLP started the BadAd essay contest as a response to the Clio Awards, an annual New York City advertising industry event that hands out prizes for clever and creative advertisements. While we recognize the incredible amounts of time, money, energy, and imagination advertisers invest in their products, we find the advertising industry's continual encroachment of our cultural space to be problematic and, in many specific instances, offensive. Particularly demeaning are many ads aimed at our thoughtful but impressionable young people, ads designed to encourage them to buy and consume products that are unnecessary (at best) and can kill them (at worst). So, we created the BadAd essay contest as a fun and educational way for students to “talk back to advertisers.”

Goals. The goals of the BadAd contest include

• providing students with a “language of the image”;
• sharpening their media literacy skills (particularly their powers of observation andwriting);
• linking their writing to a critical activist spirit;
• having fun in the process.

Contest rules. The contest rules are easy and universally applicable. We encourage students to identify a particular advertisement or ad campaign they find offensive, insulting, or just plain silly, and write a 500- to 700-word essay describing and “deconstructing” the ad. We teach and extend student knowledge as participants draw from a list of two dozen specific techniques of persuasion (symbols, flattery, bandwagon), which we make available to interested teachers as part of the contest and which are available on the Web site. We also urge students to examine the aesthetic ways in which their advertisement is constructed (looking at, for example, lighting, colors, camera angles, or music).

We encourage you to conduct a similar activity with your students or, better yet, have them send in entries for BadAd 2001. (The submission deadline will be March 2001, and full details will be posted at our Web site.)

What we've learned. We've learned much from our three years' sponsoring the BadAd contest. First, running a contest like this is a fairly simple but potent exercise in media activism, an activity that all of us can participate in. Second, there is a growing desire to take back our cultural space from advertisers who seek to dominate it. Most important, perhaps, we've learned that young people around the country are witty, funny, and smart; when given a platform with which to make critical observations about corporately-controlled advertising, they rise to the occasion in fine style!

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Citation: Williams, R. (2000, July). Students deconstructing advertising: What makes a bad ad? Reading Online, 4(1). Available: http://www.readingonline.org/newliteracies/action/williams/

Reading Online, www.readingonline.org
Posted July 2000
© 2000 International Reading Association, Inc.   ISSN 1096-1232