Market a Poison
Language Arts Project

We are constantly bombarded with messages from the advertising world. Some of the products marketed are useful, some are frivolous and some are down right dangerous: tobacco products, for instance. It is no surprise that the ad agencies that market tobacco must invest great amounts of money and effort to make their deadly products seem desirable. They must craft very convincing ads or the tobacco companies would quickly go out of business. It's not easy to get people to pay for poison but maybe you can figure out how it's done.

How would you try to market the following poisons? Write scripts for a short commercial that markets one of the poisons from the left column using an approach from the right column. Here is an example of a script written by an ad agency for this activity.

WARNING: These items, like tobacco, should never be ingested by humans:

  • chemical drain opener
  • radioactive waste
  • car exhaust
  • battery acid
  • sewage

These are all "angles" or "pitches" used by the advertising industry to convince people they need the product being marketed:

  • fashion
  • sex appeal
  • social acceptance
  • (enhances) relaxation

Note: Content created by students as part of this program may be submitted to us for inclusion in our next version of the CD ROM game. Winning scripts will be included on the CD ROM and credit given to the artist, the artists' class and school. Each winner will also receive a complementary copy of the CD ROM for his/her portfolio. Contact us for details.