I strongly endorse Kim's Cultural Critique lesson. I have used it for the past two years in both AP level junior and regular level junior classes.
Kids enjoy it and enjoy finding and decoding their own ads.
I will just add a little additional data geared from two years of working with this assignment. Car ads seem to offer the most words and the most cultural codes, so they may be best to use for the initial discussions and composing of key word lists, binary lists, and connotations. The original Escort ad is still useful, but you can find current ones easily. This ad never refers to any virtues of the boots, but it is heavy on description of the kind of person who wears them. It works well to talk about both the car ad and the boot ad and give kids a choice.