In Fall 2000, I was a young Ph.D. student teaching my second Marketing Principles class at the University of Michigan. It was in that class that I created my first active learning exercise. The “active learning” experience was so fascinating for me and so impactful for my students that I began to frequently incorporate active learning exercises into my traditional lectures. I promised my students that semester that I would post the results of the exercise on the web, and they are still available here.
The learning objectives of the exercise were related to the social impact of advertising. Advertising is often described (e.g., here) as misogynistic, with images that denigrate and mock women. Denigrating women is undoubtedly problematic for an enlightened society. The question at hand is whether advertising, collectively as an industry, is at fault. I wanted my students to directly consider whether this criticism of advertising is accurate.
I designed an activity that asked students to find two print ads: one ad that degrades women and another ad that supports, celebrates, or even honors women. I restricted students to using current magazines and newspapers rather than searching the web for old ads. I added the restriction because I wanted it to be an exercise in examining the current state of advertising rather than an exercise in identifying the worst offenders in history. I gave students ample notice for the assignment so they could “keep their eyes open” during their normal media consumption rather than making a quick search through a stack of magazines. Students submitted their selections to me, and I scanned some of the images to share with the class.
The key to the activity was a brief in-class discussion of the results. We discussed how denigrating women in advertising truly is problematic and inappropriate in an enlightened society. I then asked students how easy it was for them to find examples of the degrading ads and the honoring ads. The general consensus was that it was fairly easy to find both types of ads, but finding both types of ads took some looking. We took this to be informal evidence of the frequency of both kinds of ads in the marketplace. In our discussion, we identified four learning take-ways from the exercise: (1) denigrating women (or anyone) in advertisements is inappropriate and wrong-headed, (2) there are some ads in the current landscape that do, indeed, degrade women, (3) most ads are neutral toward women, and (4) some ads in the current landscape are supportive and even honoring of women. Therefore, a blanket indictment of all advertising as a social evil is one-sided and far too wide-ranging.
These learning points were not a central element of the course. My main reason for tackling these ideas was to prevent a problem I had observed among my students in the previous semester. I had observed that it had been difficult for some of my previous semester’s students to learn about advertising techniques while they had nagging concerns about whether advertising was inherently evil. I created this exercise to avert the problem, and it cleared a path that allowed us to dig deeply into techniques for increasing ad effectiveness. Although the exercise was a minor part of the course, it was important to me because it taught me the power of active learning exercises.
– Eric DeRosia