Manage Your Online Advert Experience (13-16 yrs)

In this resource ‘Manage Your Online Advert Experience’, we feature a three minute animated film and classroom resources to support pupil discussions around what is interest-based advertising, why it exists and how can young people best manage it. Your pupils may be surprised to learn that it’s this sort of advertising that funds so many of the free platforms they use every day, from apps and websites to search engines.

This resource can support your PSHE curriculum for living in the wider world with media literacy and digital resilience. More specifically, it builds on the PSHE programme of study to support ‘how data may be used with the aim of influencing decisions, including targeted advertising and other forms of personalisation online; strategies to manage this’. It will also be useful stimulus for Media Studies classes and form time.

Interest-based advertising can be enormously relevant and helpful to all of us – helping us to find something we’ve been looking for online or showing us new things relevant to our personal interests. Yet it can also be frustrating, for young people and adults alike, if we keep being served ads we no longer – or never – want to see. This resource helps to put young people in the driving seat of what advertising they choose to see and don’t. It will introduce them to the AdChoices tool which can help them navigate ‘personalised’ advertising, as it is more sometimes known.