To round off our persuasive writing unit, my year 5 literacy class produced video adverts using Adobe Spark for our favourite brands. We uploaded them to YouTube and contacted the CEOs or marketing department for each brand/organisation and asked them to feed back on them. We were staggered with the positive feedback that we received (not to mention the freebies!). Here's how we went about it.

First, we looked at adverts and features of persuasive writing. Next, we split up into groups of one or two and created a script for our favourite brands in Google Docs. The children then shared their scripts with me and we reviewed them as a class. Next, we got out the ipads and loaded up Adobe Spark (or Adobe Voice as it used to be known) and started to record our videos.

About Adobe Spark

Adobe Spark is really simple to use. Firstly, record your voice and then add simple graphics, text and music to create the video. Here's a quick video that explains it all:

Uploading to YouTube

Adobe Spark/Voice doesn't have an 'export to YouTube' function, so we had to copy across to a PC and then upload to YouTUbe from there.

Sending out emails

As the children don't have their own email address, I used mine and then wrote a standard email as follows to each of the CEOs:

Dear #######

I am a teacher at a rural primary school in the north of England. Our year 5 literacy class have been looking at advertisements and had to choose an organisation that they admired and create a video advert for them. One of our students chose your organisation and the video that they created is here:

It would mean a lot to them if you could write back and let us know what you thought of the video. Also, if you have any promotional goods that you would like us to hand out at the school, we'd be delighted to receive them.

Thanks in advance for your time

Gary Hall

Class Teacher

(I found their email addresses online at

Responses to our emails

As I mentioned earlier, I was amazed at the speed in which the emails came back to us from such important people. Within an hour a CEO of a well known Italian restaurant chain wrote back to us thanking us and promising to send us some promotional goods and vouchers. A few hours later another CEO of another well known high street eatery replied with the following email:

Dear Gary,

Thank you for sharing this with me. Many congratulations to your class. The video is well researched and concentrates on what makes ########## special and different. The objective of any advertisement is precisely that: communicating how you are different/better and why that should matter to your customers. It is very impressive that your class understood that so clearly and managed to bring it to life in the video. Well done to everyone! The music, visuals and voice-over are all fantastic.

I will get my team to contact you regarding promotional materials.

With kind regards,


Just getting a response to the videos from these important people was amazing but knowing that they were going to get a free meal out of it too just blew their minds! It was a great lesson in the power of persuasion with a few side lessons coming out of it too including, amongst other things, "if you don't ask, you don't get", how large organisations are structured, what marketing departments do and what promotional materials are. We also looked at the personal profiles of these CEOs and the children were really interested in their salaries too :)


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