Q:

Techniques for teaching children from the start about how to read advertising?

I took a class in high school that taught media literacy and it has been one of the few learning experiences in high that really stuck with me. I'd like my boy to learn from the beginning, when he's just starting to see advertising, how to read and understand how advertisers are trying to manipulate him.
We already live in a household without much advertising (get TV from Netflix so there are no commercials, avoid websites with ads, etc) so it's jarring when we leave our house and are bombarded with billboards, buses wrapped with ads, and flying banners, and the ads on the TVs in airports.
The obvious thing would be to talk about the ads when we see them and explain to him what they are trying to do. Are there are formal techniques for teaching media literacy to young children? Does a household without advertising make it better or worse for a child to understand what they are seeing?

A:

To answer your last question, I think that it does make it harder to teach about things that you actively exclude from your house.
What is it that you want to teach your children? Do you want them to patently hate any and all forms of advertisement? Or do you want them to develop the ability to understand what they are and why they say what they say?
We've looked at some of the ideas at PBS Kids which shows some interesting things about ads for kids.
In our house (we watch netflix but do watch normal broadcast tv as well) we talk about what the ad is selling and if we think it is a good thing to buy or if "they are just trying to trick us". By doing this we have already given our 5 year old a bit of a skeptical attitude about seeing things being sold on tv and in catalogs.

