Leveraging the Super Bowl for Media Literacy

All right, well, welcome back to another episode of Shifting Schools as we find ourselves here in February, which means that the Super Bowl is right around the corner. Trisha, you and I are actually recording this like a month before the Super Bowl, even though that this is coming out in February. Who do you think's in the Super Bowl? Because this will be fun because it's already set by the time this comes out, but who do you think made it through?

You know, I'm hoping I'm rooting for the Bills this year. And I think that's because, you know, like I'm in a place where winter is really winter and I love watching Bills fans like shovel out the state, the stadium. So they have won me over with that. What about you, Jeff? I like that. I would really I'm really hoping Detroit is in it this year. Detroit's been bad for a really long time.

And I just love it when teams who have had to persevere through a lot of bad seasons all of a sudden have an incredible season like Detroit has had. So we'll see. You and I'll see by the time this episode comes out if our predictions are right. We're looking at Detroit Bills. That'd be a good matchup, actually. I could see that matchup. That'd be a great one. That'd be an all out offensive war.

But As it is the week of the Super Bowl, much like we did last year, Trisha and I want to focus in on how you can use the Super Bowl around media literacy. We know that the Super Bowl is much about ads as it is about the game itself and what an incredible opportunity educators have to really think deeply about media literacy when we're all focused here in North America anyway. And I know even around the world, I was talking to a friend. from France, they're all into the Super Bowl as well.

So no matter where you are, this is an opportunity to really dive deep about media literacy. Absolutely, I think this is a moment when storytelling and human psychology take center stage because if your company, if your organization is investing in a Super Bowl ad, every year the cost of that goes up. We're talking millions of dollars, millions for seconds, right?

So it's a great time to invite students, like slow down, realize that any ad that you see during the Super Bowl A team of folks have spent countless hours. Every single detail is intentional. They would have had focus groups. So I think it's a really great time that you can invite students to look at those choices as intentional design choices, question what they're doing to win you over as a consumer.

And again, I think it makes students and families much more aware of how does advertising work? What is great storytelling? And of course, you every year there's an ad that maybe just doesn't work.

Talk about why. Yeah. And I think, you know, I within our friendship group, and I don't know if you do this as well, but we, we watch the ads to rate them. Like by the time the super bowl is over, we'll rate them. Like what was the best ad and what also a great opportunity to take this moment in time with students. What makes a great ad? Is it the emotional ad? Is it the funny ad?

you know, here, the way things are working now, you can probably find many of the ads the week here before the super bowl. They're probably already on YouTube. A lot of them are getting linked on YouTube early. And if they're not, you can use last year's Super Bowl ads. The great thing I love is that inside our free guide this week that comes out with this episode, you've already linked a bunch of advertisements for educators that they can go and do some media literacy behind the scenes.

It's just such a great opportunity to get kids to slow down. And when we talk about, especially, know we're really focused right now on mental health with kids. and we're really focused on what is happening to them in social media. And we have to understand that what we're talking about, when we talk about mental health and social media, we're talking about advertising that is specifically tailored to teenagers.

We need to take a moment to slow down and support students in understanding exactly what you're saying. What is the message here? Why do they frame it this way? How did this ad come to be? Why do they believe you as a teenager want to see that thing? Why did they make that choice? We have an incredible opportunity, no matter what you teach, at every grade level, to take this moment that is given to us to have some of these conversations with students.

Well, and Jeff, you highlighted one of the aspects of the opportunity that's so critical. You mentioned you've got a friendship group that's talking about it. The Super Bowl as an event is social, right? Families get together, friends get together around it. And so I think that's at the heart of this guide is leverage that people are talking about this and it's social. So the free guide has a framework of questions that it's printable. Right?

It could just be something that you've got on the coffee table right next to your Doritos and encourage parents and caregivers to like talk to kids about this. Because to your point, Jeff, we want to make sure that young learners are aware of advertising of how it works. Parents and caregivers need this too. I mean, the number of adults that I might chat with where they might not notice a sponsored article. in a periodical, in a newspaper, right?

Like advertising is everywhere and it's getting much better at sort of, you know, like trying to do bus. So I think the more we can make those moments to talk about it, the better. And if it's social, that's a huge win.

It's huge. And this is something that I do in every parent night, every parent night that I've been doing now for the last couple of years. We take a moment where we look at an ad on YouTube and we go through one of these protocols inside of this free guide. Like you said, this is a free printable. You can put this in your newsletter that's going home before the Superbowl. The one that we have, the framework that you've created for this one is called our brass framework.

And when we look at it, and this is inside the free guide, so you're to want to click on the link here in the podcast, show notes are over on shifting schools. You can download it for free. This is all free because we believe in this. We need to be doing this. Right. But I love this because, you know, you've got five questions here. And again, you could have this printed out on the coffee table. And during the ad, one of the question is who's represented and why I love that.

Who's represented and why, who was this group, who was represented in the ad and who is the target representation of that ad? What a great conversation to have as a family or a friendship group. Another great question, what assumptions are made about the audience? I love this because we as a friendship group will sit around and say, that is targeted towards millennials, that is targeted towards teenagers, that is targeted towards me at 48 years old, right?

You can almost tell where the target of these audiences are. And I think it's incredible for us to sit down and take a moment to actually think about these things. You again, you can do this in the classroom. I would do this in the classroom before you send this home and encourage your kids to do this with their with their parents at home. One more I'll share because there's there's actually five of them. I'll share just one more that's in here.

What about the context is significant to think about in connection with this? Right? What about the context? What's the context behind this? What's the moment in time we're living in? There's so many things you can break down when we just slow down a little bit and think about the what is coming through in these ads that again to your point are millions of dollars for 30 seconds, right? These aren't just put together on the whim and thrown on television.

These things have been really thought out and it's really good to take this moment in time to go through. Do you wanna talk about one of the other ones in the free articles as well? I do, but first I want to just piggyback on that because especially the context piece is a really great one to take advantage of because you mentioned YouTube has a bank going way back in time of Super Bowl ads. if there's a brand, like there are brands we see show up year after year after year.

So if there's something that's being sold, it's even interesting to say, okay, cars that are sold today, what values exist in society 2025 that they're trying to tap into? What about today's consumer are they trying to touch? Let's go back to the 90s. Is that different or has it stayed the same? So you've got a great little contrast activity that you can do there.

And I think, especially as you mentioned several times, give this to families in advance and maybe even... model some of that because that's a great way to set up a little bit of an intergenerational learning because if grandparents are there, hey, they'll tell you about

how they were marketed, you know, their car back in the day. Yeah, you make me think of Doritos for some reason, like I can remember Doritos commercials back in the 90s, the early 2000s. And all you have to do, I mean, every teacher can do this. You go to YouTube and you type in Doritos Super Bowl ad and you'll get all of them and you can compare and contrast them across the ages. I love that idea.

The other one I'll talk about storyboarding to me is such a great skill to rehearse with students because it really taps into, think, executive functioning in a way that's creative and fun. If I'm trying to plan something, a story, a project, starting from the beginning is the hardest, right? And that's where we love backwards chaining, where you kind of have the end result and you're going to reverse engineer it.

So if your students, your class pick up on one of the ads, and Jeff, I love that you pointed out, we're now in a media landscape where many of these brands will drop little previews so you know what's coming for the actual big game. Ask them about that. Are you looking forward to this year's Doritos ad? Are you talking about, I think, an AI ad is gonna steal the show? Okay, great. Well, then that's the one we wanna pay attention to. Then as a class in small groups, take the free guide.

It's going to take you through how you can do some backwards chaining. How do you think they designed that? And sort of rewind it. It's a great way, I think, to make the planning process really transparent for students and build their confidence in going the opposite direction, right? But I think it'll be a great mini group project, and then you can have them sort of contesting, what do you think was the original idea? Yeah. Yeah. I love that.

And I love the idea too, is this idea of backwards chaining, right? Taking something and then taking it into its parts also really starts to provide students with this understanding of, of inklery cycles or how things are created. You know, it's, you don't just sit down and this is the thing I want kids to understand. You don't just sit down, open up, tick-tock, make a tick-tock video and get millions of views. Nobody does that. These things are very well planned out.

They're staged out and understanding the work that goes into it and being able to backward storyboard what went into, what do you think went into that commercial, I think is an incredible opportunity to get kids to critically think about the media that we see every day. I think it's an activity that's scalable. You can do it with younger primary grade students. Also, if you teach psychology in high school, what do you think were some of the focus group questions they had to come up with?

What do you think they were trying to connect with in terms of human emotion, and how do they do that? So I love the scalability there. But, know, Jeff, this is also when we're talking about

AI and you and I are working with educators, I think we're always trying to drive home the point that it's not a literacy that stands by itself. AI literacy is very much connected to media literacy. I find often the way that people feel about this technology connects so deeply with some of the stories, right? It is almost cliche now how often someone will bring up Terminator. And we've almost been primed to be afraid of any new technology.

So I think that's why in part, you and I are so excited about April 17th, where we're gonna go much deeper into that conversation of how do you weave these two literacies together and understand their connection? Yeah, and so as Tricia is hinting to, our goal here is on April 17th, if you would like to join us for a day of learning about AI and media literacy, we are planning a three-part webinar series on April 17th. You can put that on your calendar.

You'll see more about that all over Shifting Schools and here in the podcast as well coming up. But we're gonna be doing the three-part webinar series. The first part's gonna be on media literacy and AI. Then we're gonna do a session on AI powered research and what does that mean? And then the third part will be AI as a student, which is really, really powerful stuff.

I know both of us have been looking at all the stuff that teachers are starting to do with that over on LinkedIn and the power that we're seeing with that. So hopefully you can join us, mark your calendar, April 17th, more information all over here at Shifting Schools. Make sure you're in the newsletter so you can get the early bird special when that comes out. What do you think as we get ready to wrap this up?

Do you think we're going to see much like we did over the winter break and Christmas with Coca-Cola and their Christmas commercials, like taking that, the old polar bear, again, talk about media literacy, right? The polar bear commercials from the 1990s and remaking them using all AI. There were three commercials that came out that was all AI created.

Do you think we're going to see an all AI created video for the Superbowl or do you think it's going to be more of AI as the advertisement, like people pushing their product of AI? versus AI being leveraged to create the ad. What do you think? What do think we're going to see on that? I think we're going to see hybrid because I think we're still at a stage where the transparency piece really matters to people.

Like, I don't know about you, Jeff, but I feel like actually any time I post on LinkedIn, I write my LinkedIn posts because I like writing, but I'm always like, I wonder if people question whether I wrote this or not. So I think we might see an advertiser really play with that notion of there's a setup where it seems all AI. generated and then they're gonna flip the switch kind of.

That's my prediction because I think we're still in that little anxiety period of how do we feel about full AI content. Yeah. I can see them doing, now that you say that we're like, you know, at the very end of the ad, it's just a black screen and say this whole thing created by humans or something like that. Right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It'll be interesting to see.

I'm excited to see how AI, both on what companies, if there are any companies that are, that are going to be paying millions of dollars promote. And it reminds me, I'm just thinking this could be the Superbowl. Like I remember the Superbowl of 2000, 2001 during the first tech boom when the internet came out where you had pets.com and you had like every commercial was about a new internet driven company, right? Right before the tech or during the tech boom, before the tech bust, the bubble there.

It'll be really interesting to see. I just don't know yet of where we're going to be or how much AI is going to be say to your point, the car commercials that always come out. How much AI are we going to see inside cars of the future? So it's an interesting time. It's a great time to talk about media literacy. It's a great time to talk about AI. Put April 17th on your calendar. Again, more information about our three-part webinar series.

You'll be able to spend three hours with us on April 17th, diving deep into all of this. And don't forget to go download that free guide. You can find it here, a link to it here in the show notes, of course, over at Shifting Schools and anywhere you follow us on social media. I know Tricia will have links everywhere. So don't forget to go download that. You get the posters, you get the ideas about storyboarding with students.

It's all there for you, all free as part of our series here on media literacy and AI and really taking advantage of the Super Bowl. Jeff, one thing that just came to mind, I know that you and I absolutely love when listeners or newsletter subscribers let us know they've actioned some of these resources. So I'm thinking to, hey, if you take this free guide and you do share it in your parent caregiver newsletter, send us a little screenshot.

We're gonna send you a discount code for that April 17th as a thank you, because we love that so much. Again, the link to download that free guide is of course over there in the show notes. Looking forward to the Super Bowl. Know you are too. Yep, awesome. Let us know how this works for you and we'll see you next week here on Shifting Schools.