Beyond the Classroom Experience #3 – It’s all about advertising

Name: ______

What are the different ways that companies advertise their products?

Why is it important to advertise?

How do people make a decision on what to buy?

How do you think advertising has changed from the past and how might it change in the future?

What do you think it costs to advertise a product? (give different costs based on your answer from question #1)

What are some of the ways that Math fits into advertising?(give as many examples as you can)

Vocabulary words – what do you think the words/phrases below means?

Consumer

Market research

Demographic

Brand

marketing

First week back

  1. Pre test
  1. Show students different types of commercials – radio, visual and magazine. Why did they find them effective. Develop success criteria for an effective ad
  1. Start thinking about a product you might like to advertise and how you will advertise it.
  1. Show Austin’s Butterfly for discussion around the editing process
  1. Share some of the math in advance and info re Cieslok and stats
  2. By the time we get to Cieslok, students should have some ideas on what they might want to advertise and whether by themselves or in pairs.

Day 1 journal – on the bus ride down notice advertising in action

Day 1 topic – Currently focus on managing an OOH company with Jorg and Chris. IF possible, switch day one and day 3 as the day 3 topic might give students ideas on developing their own advertising campaign.

Right from day one, students start working on their campaign

We share the expectations below on day 1?

Expectation is that individual students or pairs work on their campaign. It will include

  • Print, video or audio commercial
  • A back ground on their company (name, philosophy, operating budget, # of employees)
  • An email to the company of the product their advertising to find out stats on the demographic they are aiming for or something interesting about the product that the company wants to highlight
  • Analysis of their ad – which group they were targeting and what they did in their advertising campaign to try and target that group
  • Students will also be responsible for doing an analysis of another group as well.

Possible math connections

  1. Measurement – perimeter and area of a magazine ad and billboard ad and the possible costs associated with both (both the materials and costs of space – e.g. how much it costs for one day to have a billboard up; how much it costs to have an ad in a magazine as opposed to newspaper)
  1. Budget for an advertising campaign for tv or radio - and when it’s most expensive – eg super bowl, etc
  2. Some type of patterning question – tessellations, or rotations or flips

Math Day 1 – Cost of Outdoor advertising

Yonge and Dundas location has 144 237 impressions per day (this means the number of times people see an ad). It costs $436 591 for a company to keep the ad up for four weeks.

How many impressions would there be over 4 weeks?

Break down the companies bang for the buck.

Eg. If there were 200 impressions over 4 weeks and the company paid $500 for this then it would mean that the company is essentially paying $2.50 for every person that is seeing the billboard.

Danforth and pape location has 17 500 daily impressions

The media cost is $16 538

How many impressions would there be over 4 weeks.

Compare the bang for the buck between Yonge and Dundas and Danforth and Pape. Which location makes more sense for your advertising dollar (make sure you carefully compare the stats – the big numbers aren’t the ones to look at – it’s the breakdown you want to see)

Math Day 2 – Comparing different advertising media

Use the following stats and create either a bar graph, pictograph or circle graph to compare the costs of different types of advertising. Include at least three different advertising mediums.

You can also use the stats for Outdoor advertising if you want

The cost of producing a billboard ad at Yonge and Dundas is $85 671 for the actual ad and $81 168 for the installation.

After you complete your graph, include an analysis on what medium of advertising you think is the most cost effective and what type of advertising is best at increasing your product awareness.