Food Ad Mascots
Being having students access the Image Slider in the student chapter Food Ad Mascots or display it on a screen or digital whiteboard.
Ask students:
- How many of these characters do you recognize?
- Do you remember where you first saw them?
- What brands does each one stand for?
- Why do they think food companies have mascots? How does a mascot make food ads work better?
- In the discussion of this question, make sure students understand that the main purpose of a lot of ads is to get you to remember a product and have good feelings about it. (Most people will decide what brand of cereal they like as children—and lots of people eat the same cereal for their whole lives; even if they don’t, when they have kids they’ll remember what kind of cereal they liked.) How do mascots help with that?
- What shapes are mostly used for each mascot design? How does that affect how you see them? (Remind students of the “shape language” they learned about in Comic Book Characters.)
- Could you describe the personality of any of these characters? If so, what are they like? (For example: Toucan Sam is friendly, Tony the Tiger is encouraging, Lucky the Leprechaun is mischievous.)
- How does each mascot fit the brand they are being used for? (Have students think in terms of how the character looks — for instance the colours of Toucan Sam’s beak representing the different colours of Froot Loops — and their personality.
- Why do advertisers like to have their mascots appear in lots of different media, like YouTube or video games?
- Make sure they understand that the more different situations we see the characters in, the more memorable and “real” they seem to us. This means we have a stronger emotional attachment to them.
definition
A mascot is a character that stands for a brand.