I-YEL Unmasks the Media

The Naked Truth from Crissy Field Center on Vimeo.
Every year, Inspiring Young Emerging Leaders create a YEL project. These projects revolve around a social or environmental issue that we feel strongly about, and we think of a creative way to share it with the public. This year, we decided to focus our YEL project on media and its influence on youth, and with the celebration of the 75^th anniversary of Golden Gate Bridge rolling around, what better project would we do than to have a carnival! As we pushed towards the May 27^th deadline, our teams worked hard creating different carnival booths, and finally presented our project, Unmasking the Media, on the day of the bridge celebration. 

We decided on having six carnival booths, each focusing on a different aspect of media: knocking over cans to find product placement ads; throwing darts to target stereotypes and race and gender issues. Our project also included a game show played off of “The Price is Right,” where contestants guessed the true costs of the latest celebrity styles, and learned about 2^nd hand alternatives. We also premiered a short movie/documentary that my group created called The Naked Truth. Our documentary was based on advertising and how audiences are targeted for company profits and how much our lives revolve around advertising. Our intention for creating The Naked Truth was to inform audiences about the tactics corporations use to target customers and how tactics have evolved to become more aggressive. Through watching our video, we hope that audiences will now look at advertising through a more critical eye, thinking twice about advertisements that are being thrown at them. 

Our carnival was a HUGE hit. There was a constant flow of hundreds of people stopping by while enjoying the Golden Gate Bridge celebration. My video group had a goal of 175 viewers for a burrito reward from our mentor Jon, and we reached over 200-that meant FREE BURRITOS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

We ended this great day watching the amazing bridge fireworkand laser light show, with introductions done by I-YELers in different languages.

- Jane Marie