Happy New Year to you and yours
Here’s to a healthier, more positive 2021.
As of January 4th, all of the UK is now in full lockdown and parents, and schools find themselves juggling online learning (again).
As a parent myself working full-time, I have immense respect for all the teachers out there who have had to adapt to lockdowns and home learning. I also appreciate the teachers who are in schools supporting vulnerable children and those of key workers.
How can Media Smart UK support you?
Over the last year, Media Smart has won awards and helped thousands of teachers, guardians and parents. You have downloaded our resources 75,000 since our relaunch in 2014.
The backing of the advertising industry has allowed Media Smart to reach more young people than ever before in 2020, through a broader portfolio of campaigns from body image and healthy eating to social media influencers. Our many online educational resources enabled the team to react to the COVID-19 pandemic with programmes to support home-schooling and distance learning. In April alone, during the first lockdown, we had 26,000 visitors to our website (compared to a monthly average of 11,000)
We launched three new educational resources:
Piracy: what’s the big deal? – Did you know one in four over 12s have illegally downloaded film content in the last three months? That’s the highest rate of piracy in the UK in the previous five years*. We teamed up with Sky, Industry Trust, The Intellectual Property Office and Motion Picture Association to develop a new PSHE accredited secondary school resource to help young people make better choices online and understand the impact of piracy.
How to manage your online advertising experience – watch our animated film and use our resources to find out what is interest-based advertising, why it exists, and how young people can manage their online experience.
Creating an advert – young people can go behind the scenes at a real agency and learn how to develop an advertising campaign. Featuring interviews with the agency team that created ‘Eat Them to Defeat Them’, a successful advert encouraging younger children to eat more vegetables. They will take on ad agency roles, pitching against each other to win the account to make an advert targeting their age group with the healthy eating message.
We want to do more! Our aim over the next year is to:
• Make it even easier for you to access our resources, notably to support home-schooling and remote learning.
• Build media and digital literacy as a stepping stone to future employability, citizenship and well-being for young people.
• Keep providing up to date exciting resources that cover all the new developments in advertising and digital literacy.
• Provide resources that educate young people to understand the opportunities online and navigate them to make informed choices.
What else is going on in the world?
The BBC is putting on its ‘biggest education offer’ of all time after pupils across England were told to stay at home until mid-February.
The Clubhouse App was launched on an invite-only basis using FOMO (fear of missing out) marketing techniques to gain interest.
Debates over Apple’s IOS 14 updates continue, and as consumers and business owners, we wonder what impacts and changes are ahead.
Millions will be supporting Safer Internet Day on 9th February 2021. Safer Internet Day 2021 will be celebrated in the UK with the theme: An internet we trust: exploring reliability in the online world.
