2024 Future You Summit features interactive Ad Observatory workshop
Author Kathy Nickels
Date 16 July 2024
The Future You Summit, hosted by the Queensland University of Technology (QUT), attracted over 300 Year 11 and 12 students from 175 schools, making this year’s summit the largest yet. Attendees engaged in transformative learning experiences, exploring diverse academic disciplines and gaining a firsthand look into university life.
Among the standout features of this year’s summit was the workshop Behind the Screen: A Critical Workshop on Online Advertising Practices. With social media advertising shaping much of the world’s digital landscape, this workshop provided students with a unique opportunity to explore the underlying mechanisms of online advertising and its impact on everyday life.
The workshop was created by ADM+S Chief Investigator and Director of QUT’s Digital Media Research Centre, Professor Daniel Angus based on the research conducted by the Australian Ad Observatory project at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society (ADM+S).
Through the Behind the Screen workshop, students learned how social media advertising influences their personal experiences and what role data plays in the process.
The workshop allowed participants to analyse their own social media feeds, using both personal data and insights from the Australian Ad Observatory, to understand how advertising practices are tailored to specific audiences. Students discovered the ways advertisers target consumers through social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok.
“The session was engaging, informative, and insightful,” said one student. “The practical activities helped me understand how ads are tailored to my personal interests, and I was fascinated by how the data was used to target different audiences.”
