BodiMojo Teen Health Blog – Teenage Nutrition, Fitness, Stress, Relationships & More

The Federal Trade Commission is getting into the business of educating youth about advertisements. I suppose it’s about time.  Admongo.gov, an online Web site, is targeted to tweens to teach critical thinking skills about advertising.  Their approach is to use a single player video game that allows the tween to create an avatar and then jump through a series of virtual environments and levels of play.  It’s sort of cute.  I had my 10-year-old daughter (the gamer in the family) try it as I watched silently.

To take the “Ultimate Ad Challenge” she went through two environments in an effort to get “Aducated.” In the “Sidewalk” series, the Avatar clicks on ads placed on billboards, bus stop kiosks, and city buses. The second is a “Home,” with magazines, packages (cereal box), logos, news flyers, and a free product poster.  Some items had bonus questions related to what is the ad is trying to sell or who is the real advertiser behind the message.

What I noticed, however, is that my kid was more interested in getting the coins you collect along the way and reaching the levels than in the actual educational content. Isn’t this the real challenge of education games?

I thought the FTC is making the first right step in engagement. The real task will be bridging the engagement to knowledge, action and self-reflection: have more players involved in collecting the knowledge factoids as a team, promote contests and polls on the decoding of ads, and a curriculum for teacher and parents to bring the online learning into the real world. (There is a basic teacher curriculum and video trainings are coming soon: http://www.admongo.gov/curriculum.aspx)

Of all the knowledge questions, the one that tripped up my daughter was the poster with a basketball player. She thought it was promoting the athlete and not the basketball maker.  An easy “mistake.” I supposed she learned something.

The part I thought was missing – and maybe we have to play around more – was how ads can make you feel about yourself, not what ads are trying to make you feel (“Oh, if I buy those sneakers it will make me popular.”) There is research that shows that when girls, for instance, look at fashion magazines for even a few minutes, the net result is feeling dissatisfied about their bodies or some physical feature.  The wish to look like that cover model translates to “I hate my body” or “I will never be beautiful…. athletic…. popular.”

Kids today understand what digital photo editing is, and many know how ads are created to be slick, sexy and cool.  They learn Photoshop in grade school. It is the subtle, often negative self-perceptions that tweens and teens need to learn to recognize – not only how to decode ads as AdMongo.gov is helping them to learn –but to recognize, buffer and respond critically to their own reactions. And that’s not easy.