plan demo group 6 Ads

Advertisement storyboard

Adam Malster, British Council, Taipei

Level – Pre-intermediate and above
In this lesson students produce a storyboard for an advertisement.
The exercises in this lesson introduce some of the elements of advertisements such as
slogans. There is a discussion on where advertisements can be found. The concept of a
storyboard is introduced and an example of a storyboard for an advert is examined in
detail. In the final stage of the lesson, students are given the opportunity to produce their
own storyboard to advertise a product. Extension tasks are also suggested.

Procedure

Cut up the Advert Blurbs 1 Worksheet A so that the names of the products and the
blurbs are separate. Stick the names of the products and the blurbs to the walls of your
classroom at random.
The students now circulate and try to match the products to the right blurbs. Some of the
words are missing from the blurbs so they will have to do some guessing.
When the products and blurbs have been matched, spend some time asking the class
how they managed to match each product to its blurb. Take this opportunity to highlight
key language and clues such as “Say cheese!” being an obvious phrase connected with
photography.

Distribute the Advert Blurbs 2 Worksheet B. The students now need complete the cloze
activity. With higher levels you could even choose not to give them any of the words at
all and have them generate their own.
Introduce the idea of a slogan at this point by quoting some famous slogans and having
the class tell you the product. Some examples could be:
I’m loving it. (McDonald’s)
Just do it. (Nike)
Now ask the students to highlight the slogans on the worksheet.
Elicit where the adverts from the worksheet could be found (Newspapers or magazines)
and also elicit where else adverts can be seen or heard. (Billboards, the sides of buses
or taxis, radio) The answer you are looking to elicit here is television!
At this point if you have the facilities you could:
• Look on You Tube and find a montage of advertisements. Ask the class
to name the type of each product. You could also ask them to note down
the slogans.
• Show an advert with a story to it and give the students some simple
questions so they can draw it out for themselves. The Levis
advertisements from the late 1980s and early 90s are good for this. I
particularly like the one staring Brad Pitt, as you can get the class to
guess which famous movie star features in it. (Again YouTube is an
excellent source for this kind of material.)
Introduce the idea of a storyboard. A storyboard is a series of pictures which show
changes of action planned for an advertisement. It is a cheap way for directors to get an
idea of what the advert will look like before they start filming.
Show the Citrus Shine Soft Drink storyboard to the class and get them to describe the
events in the advert as you go. At this point you need to decide what tenses you want
your class to produce. Elementary classes should produce present tenses while higher
levels can produce narrative tenses (although less natural than present tenses for this
task it is very good practice).
Distribute the Citrus Shine Soft Drink storyboard and the storyboard questions
worksheet. Now the students answer the questions about the Citrus Shine advert. They
must complete this task by writing full sentences. This will prepare them for the writing
stage when they produce their own storyboard.
Divide your class into pairs and distribute examples of real products to the class. You
could use examples of products like those on the Advert Blurb worksheet or you could
bring in some other examples.
Distribute the advert storyboard template. The students now must produce their own
storyboard. The advert should tell a simple story like the Citrus Shine example. For each
picture they must write a few sentences describing what is happening. Again for
elementary classes focus on present tenses while higher levels should use narrative
tenses. The last picture of the storyboard should be a shot of the product with a logo and
slogan.

Follow up
As an extension task you can ask quicker groups to think of the type of music that goes
with the advert. They could even put a jingle or a song together.
When the storyboards are complete there are a number of things you can do with them.
• Stick the storyboards up around the room. The students can now look at them all
and vote for their favourite (they can’t vote for their own!)
• Each group could present their storyboard to the class. Again a class vote could
follow.
• If you have the equipment the storyboards could be filmed in a later class. The
videos could then be watched and a vote could be held on the results. Pairs of
students could either film their own storyboard or use that of another group