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Discussion Did your primary/elementary school ever do brand propaganda?

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Bob-omb
I was just thinking back and I remembered that my school had a representative of warburtons (a bread company) come in and give us five to six year olds a lecture about bread and how much better warburtons bread was compared to other brands of bread (they specifically mentioned hovis). I'm pretty sure they gave us a warburtons branded keychain thingy as well.

We had the cops come in to do weed propaganda when we were ten but I think that's a bit more common. I've never heard anyone else have a commercial brand propaganda lecture in school. The worst part is that it worked. I kept asking my mum to buy their bread after that.
 
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We had a yo-yo guy visit our school in the late 90s to show off tricks and sell yo-yos, but it was sick as hell and sparked a craze. That year I got a Yomega x-brain for my birthday which returned from sleep automatically. The pinnacle of cool.
 
BombChorizo said:
We had a yo-yo guy visit our school in the late 90s to show off tricks and sell yo-yos, but it was sick as hell and sparked a craze. That year I got a Yomega x-brain for my birthday which returned from sleep automatically. The pinnacle of cool.
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I think we had this too? They weren't selling yo-yos I don't think but they did do tricks at an assembly and we all went home and demanded yo-yos that week nevertheless.

That Warburtons thing sounds hilarious. Better than Hovis??? The best bread is whatever's on offer innit. Were they headquartered near you, or was there a factory? As in maybe it was seen as of local interest?

We did have a bank set up a stall in the entrance of our secondary school one time. I think it was the only bank with a branch in our village but it was still weird that they encouraged a bunch of tweens to open personal accounts. You got a free faux leather planner and a pen. I wonder how many people stuck with them into adulthood and if it's a big way to get brand loyalty.
 
Ramune said:
I think we had this too? They weren't selling yo-yos I don't think but they did do tricks at an assembly and we all went home and demanded yo-yos that week nevertheless.

That Warburtons thing sounds hilarious. Better than Hovis??? The best bread is whatever's on offer innit. Were they headquartered near you, or was there a factory? As in maybe it was seen as of local interest?

We did have a bank set up a stall in the entrance of our secondary school one time. I think it was the only bank with a branch in our village but it was still weird that they encouraged a bunch of tweens to open personal accounts. You got a free faux leather planner and a pen. I wonder how many people stuck with them into adulthood and if it's a big way to get brand loyalty.
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It wasn't headquartered near us and none of their factories are nearby today. Maybe there was one in the past though. That would make a bit more sense.

I wouldn't be surprised about bank accounts. Plenty of people I know still use the same bank as when they were teens. Not like there's a significant customer facing difference between them (I've used most of them for switching offers).
 
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Yeah, Coke in my case. My school was near one of their fabrics and they sponsored a lot of things (like the soccer field, balls, painting the school every year, etc) and there was did guy that came every 2 months to tak about science which ususally ended with something regarding Coke. And of course our school trips were to the fabric
 
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In middle school, we had a unit on environment conservation and climate change.

At the end of the unit, we had someone from our major electric company come in and tell literally everyone that renewable energy will never work, we will always be dependent on oil, and it is 100% completely safe.

Good going school.
 
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The idea of a school taking payolas from Big Bread is as hilarious as it is scary! I don't remember anything like this
 
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We never had a bread guy show up, but in-school marketing was (and definitely still is) a thing. A lot of times it would be corporate sponsorships of videos. Like, we'd watch a video tape of some group's attempt to make a hot air balloon that could go to the edge of space, and it would be sort of tangentially science related or educational, and then there would always be a point in the video where it pivoted to talking about the sponsor (turns out the hot-air-balloon-to-space endeavor, and the video, is sponsored by realty company Remax, whose logo is a hot air balloon!) and generally when it became clear that there wasn't going to be an more educational stuff and it would be just Remax talking about how awesome and innovative Remax was, the teacher stopped the tape.

Those sorts of videos were clearly made to be played in schools but I'm not sure I really understood the logic of some of them. What were we supposed to do, go home and beg our parents that the next time they sold their house, to use a Remax agent?
 
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Not in elementary school, no.

We did do some events surrounding the "No Power To Drugs" campaign (which is ironic, given our country's love for beer), but that's been about it.

We had an info session with a health insurance company about some post-grad stuff in upper education and while informative, it was clear to most that this was advertisement.
 
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I don't recall this during my schooling, but as a teacher, I see how it can happen. We are so often told that there's no money to do anything, so turning to corporate sponsorships can be a viable option. We're currently courting donations from businesses to try to get some programs off the ground. We're trying to focus it on small, local business, but often they don't have the donation wells that larger corporations do.
 
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I don't recall this ever happening, but my elementary school was definitely underfunded, so it wouldn't surprise me if it did. Pretty much any time something was suggested it was shot down with "we don't have the money," and this was a firmly middle class district, so I can't imagine what it's like elsewhere.
 
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Yeah we got the yo-yo assembly, and in high school we got a whole bunch of anti drug and AIDS awareness assemblies. One of anti drug ones was sponsored by DARE and the cops and featured actual car crash aftermath footage set to Pink Floyd’s “On the Run”

Something so over the top manipulative that it made me angry at the people who made it instead of imprinting “drugs are bad” on my developing little brain. “Here, we want you to hate and fear drugs, now watch the most tragic moments of some people’s lives with real life blood and gore even though we would scream if you were to watch ‘Predator,‘ ‘Alien’ or ‘Robocop’ (where the gore was fake and no one got hurt).” just, the usual day to day of living in a district run by right wing fundamentalists
 
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The closest thing I can think of is one time we went on a school trip to a milk processing factory and as part of the visit we watched a couple of (quite long) videos that were almost entirely about how their milk was SCIENTIFICALLY PROVEN to be tastier, healthier... than all the other brands. A couple of kids in my class almost got in trouble during the visit because they would start shouting "ADVERTISEMENT! ADVERTISEMENT!" in a pseudo-robotic voice whenever one of those segments popped up.
 
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