When Rebecca Greenstein and Dalia Rotstein were twelve years old, they came up with an unusual idea for a science project. They decided to find about TV advertising by looking at the scientific experiments in some TV commercials. With their amazing project, Rebecca and Dalia became winners at their school's science fair - and went to compete at the annual Canada-Wide Science Fair!
Interviewer: What was the main idea behind your science fair project?
Dalia: The purpose was to look at brand-name products which have scientific experiments presented in TV ads. We looked at the commercials for several of these products, then we did the experiments ourselves to see how well they worked outside the commercial. As we took some of each product's competitors and tested them in the same experiments.
Rebecca: We also made up our own variations of the TV experiments and tried those too. We did that to extend our knowledge and make our project a more unique science project that it would have been if we had just done what we saw on TV.
Interviewer: Why did you decide to look at advertising for your project?
Rebecca: Commercials are something we're exposed to every day and we take them at face value. Kids, especially, are always taught to see things and not really question them. Basically, we wanted to do the experiments we saw on TV and see how well they worked in real life. That's the main idea behind most science projects: you notice something that you see every day, you get curious about it, and you wonder why it is that way.
Interviewer: Were you surprised at the results you got?
Rebecca: We didn't expect any of our results to be wildly different from what was shown on TV. But at the same time, we didn't expect them to turn out exactly the same way.
Dalia: We tried the experiments for five different products. One product worked perfectly and two didn't work at all the way they did on TV. The other two products were somewhere in between.
Interviewer: Did you contact the companies whose products you tested?
Dalia: Yes, we did, at the beginning of our project. A lot of companies sent stuff to us describing their experiments, including instructions for doing the experiments. It was very interesting to receive their results. Some companies also sent instructions for other experiments, not just the TV ones. Some of the companies were more willing to do this than others and one company said they couldn't send us anything because their stuff was confidential.
Rebecca: After we finished our project, we wrote to the companies again. We just told them we would be sharing our results at the Canada-Wide Science Fair. We told them that if they had any comments or questions on how we conducted our experiments, please feel free to contact us. That was a long time ago. I hope eventually we'll get a response, but it's hard to say.
Interviewer: How did you find the names of the companies and their addresses?
Rebecca: We looked on the products' packages. Sometime they give mailing addresses right on the box. That's how we got a lot of our mailing information.
Interviewer: Now that you've done a science project on TV advertising, what do you think of TV advertising in general?
Dalia: I think a lot of advertising is unclear and takes advantage of the fact that you're not really paying close attention because it's only a commercial.
Rebecca: I think people should look at TV advertising a lot more critically and question everything they see and are told. You really have to go and find out yourself.
Questions
- What was the purpose of Rebecca and Dalia's Science Fair project?
- Did they get very much cooperation from the companies behind the products they tested?
- How did they contact the companies? What other ways might they have contacted them?
- How did they enhance their experiments?
- What were their results?
- What do they think of television advertising?
- Do you agree or disagree with Dalia's statement that people don't really pay close attention because it's "only a commercial"?
- In Canada, are there any rules about the claims advertisers can make about products?
Reprinted with permission from The TV Book: Talking Back to Your TV, by Shelagh Wallace, Annick Press (Toronto, Canada), 1996.
