WebSpotlight: Admongo.gov

Recently the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) launched a new website, Admongo.gov, that features an online game designed to help educate tweens about advertising and empower them to think critically and make better informed consumer choices. The game "teaches core ad literacy concepts through game play." The site also includes a section of curriculum for educators and parents to use with their tween children.

The sections of the game use fake brands similar to many products marketed to tweens to help players learn to:

• identify ads
• decode ads (see how the pieces of an ad work together to make the ad more appealing)
• understand how advertisers target their ads
• make their own ads

The game is single-player, and players begin by creating their own avatar from a list of attributes. At each level, players pick up points for completing the mission, answering bonus questions, and collecting coins. The game's designers have worked hard to make it fun and very video game-like, but it's pretty simple, straightforward play, and the "lessons" within each mission may turn off tweens used to more flash and fun. While certainly not a one-stop resource for helping kids learn media literacy skills, it's a useful tool for trying to hook the interest of kids used to learning from textbooks and chalkboards and teach them a few insider strategies.

Admongo isn't without controversy, so in addition to using it as a tool to help teach kids basic media literacy awareness, it serves as a great tool in itself for media and marketing deconstruction. As "Corporate Babysitter" Lisa Ray said in a recent blog post:

"Agencies who should be doing something now are instead putting their time and effort into advertising literacy campaigns. The FTC recently unveiled Admongo, an online game to teach kids how to decipher the very ads that shouldn’t be directed at them in the first place. Why not just go after the advertisers? Seems the FTC was careful not to alienate any corporate campaign donors when creating Admongo, in fact, they’ve partnered with Scholastic, the single largest offender of bringing corporate advertising directly into the classroom via licensed-character-laden books."

And, in a mixed-review on Slate, writer Seth Stevenson, mentions:

"...check out the Admongo poster, which the FTC includes with the package of curriculum materials it makes available to teachers. The poster is meant to be hung up in classrooms. It's an illustration that helps kids spot all the different places ads can appear, from cereal boxes to magazines to blimps in the sky. Ironically, in the poster's lower right corner is the logo for Scholastic—which worked with the FTC on the Admongo project, and which sells books and other products through its catalogs to a captive school-kid audience."

~ Marsha

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