source
Commercial advertising media can include wall paintings, billboards, street furniture components, printed flyers and rack cards, radio, cinema and television adverts, web banners, mobile telephone screens, shopping carts, web popups, skywriting, bus stop benches, human billboards, magazines, newspapers, town criers, sides of buses, banners attached to or sides of airplanes ("logojets"), in-flight advertisements on seatback tray tables or overhead storage bins, taxicab doors, roof mounts and passenger screens, musical stage shows, subway platforms and trains, elastic bands on disposable diapers, stickers on apples in supermarkets, shopping cart handles (grabertising), the opening section of streaming audio and video, posters, and the backs of event tickets and supermarket receipts. Any place an "identified" sponsor pays to deliver their message through a medium is advertising.
Did you know that the most powerful tools that manufacturers have to convince you to buy their products may just be invisible to you?
Why do you think that this is so?
Do you think that your generation is less naive than your grandparents' generation?
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About hidden advertising...
Kalle Lasn, one of the most outspoken critics of advertising on the international stage, considers advertising “the most prevalent and toxic of the mental pollutants. From the moment your radio alarm sounds in the morning to the wee hours of late-night TV microjolts of commercial pollution flood into your brain at the rate of around 3,000 marketing messages per day. Every day an estimated twelve billion display ads, 3 million radio commercials and more than 200,000 television commercials are dumped into North America’s collective unconscious”.[23] In the course of his life the average American watches three years of advertising on television. [24]
Click to: Adbusters Spoof Ads
Can you write and design a poster spoof ad?
It’s standard business management knowledge that advertising is a pillar, if not “the” pillar of the growth-orientated free capitalist economy. “Advertising is part of the bone marrow of corporate capitalism.” [26] “Contemporary capitalism could not function and global production networks could not exist as they do without advertising.”[1]
are forms of advertising, where branded goods or services are placed in a context usually devoid of ads, such as movies, the story line of television shows, or news programs. The product placement is often not disclosed at the time that the good or service is featured.
SCAN THE SITE OF THIS SUCCESSFUL COMPANY THAT SELLS INVISIBLE ADVERTISING
DOWNLOAD THEIR BROCHURE
1. HOW DOES THIS COMPANY WORK?
2. HOW IS IT DIFFERENT FROM 'VISIBLE" ADVERISING?
3. WATCH YOUR FAVOURITE SHOW TONIGHT - LOOK FOR PRODUCT PLACEMENTS
4. MAKE A LIST AND BRING IT TO CLASS.
* WERE YOU AWARE OF EMBEDDED PRODUCTS IN SOME OF THE TV SHOWS ON THEIR CLIENT LIST?
* Try to remember a favourite movie that you have watched many times. Do you remember the hidden products? Look up the movie in this database & be prepared to talk about it in class.
PART ONE
Have you tried out this new Facebook app? Created just for your entertainment & fun? What do you think?
1. What would motivate the developer to create it? Make money? How?
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Read this quote from their site.
2. Why does Facebook have the legal disclaimer tacked on at the end?
Compared to Me is a simple and fun
tool that allows you to compare yourself with your friends on a series
of questions. This tool offers a way to discover self images by
comparing your responses to the average answers of all users. In
addition, it also helps you identify friends who share similar self
images with you.
Your answers to the questions will be used in aggregate and will not be individually disclosed to others.
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Now - click here to read about the reasons behind the development of this app.
Read the article and answer the questions.
3. What would motivate the developer to create it?
Are you concerned about your privacy? If NOT, perhaps you should be. Check out the Youth Privacy Blog feed to your right - >
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PART TWO
"Social networks such as Facebook and Twitter allow marketers to insert themselves into the rapid patter of items that make up the real-time feed created by each user." -Advertising Age
Click to the advertising departments at Facebook and Twitter.
THE MEDIA CONTRUCTS MESSAGES ( news, advertising, commercials, editorials, everthing!)
TO BE MEDIA LITERATE - YOU NEED DE-CONSTRUCT THEM.
HOW?
When reading, listening or watching , ask these questions
Who created this message?
What techniques are they using to attract my attention?
How might different people understand this message differently from me?
What lifestyles, values, and points of view are represented in or omitted from this message?
Why was this message sent?
Eight Key Concepts for Media Literacy 2. The media construct reality 3. Audiences negotiate meaning in the media 4. Media have commercial implications 5. Media contain ideological and value messages 6. Media have social and political implications 7. Form and content are closely related in the media 8. Each medium has a unique aesthetic form Source: John Pungente, S.J. From Barry Duncan et al. Media Literacy Resource Guide, Ontario Ministry of Education, Toronto, ON. Canada, 1989.
1. All media are construction
John Pungente, S.J.
The
media do not present simple reflections of external reality. Rather,
they present carefully crafted constructions that reflect many
decisions and result from many determining factors. Media Literacy
works towards deconstructing these constructions, taking them apart to
show how they are made.
The media are
responsible for the majority of the observations and experiences from
which we build up our personal understandings of the world and how it
works. Much of our view of reality is based on media messages that have
been pre-constructed and have attitudes, interpretations and
conclusions already built in. The media, to a great extent, give us our
sense of reality.
The
media provide us with much of the material upon which we build our
picture of reality, and we all "negotiate" meaning according to
individual factors: personal needs and anxieties, the pleasures or
troubles of the day, racial and sexual attitudes, family and cultural
background, and so forth.
Media
Literacy aims to encourage an awareness of how the media are influenced
by commercial considerations, and how these affect content, technique
and distribution. Most media production is a business, and must
therefore make a profit. Questions of ownership and control are
central: a relatively small number of individuals control what we
watch, read and hear in the media.
All
media products are advertising, in some sense, in that they proclaim
values and ways of life. Explicitly or implicitly, the mainstream media
convey ideological messages about such issues as the nature of the good
life, the virtue of consumerism, the role of women, the acceptance of
authority, and unquestioning patriotism.
The
media have great influence on politics and on forming social change.
Television can greatly influence the election of a national leader on
the basis of image. The media involve us in concerns such as civil
rights issues, famines in Africa, and the AIDS epidemic. They give us
an intimate sense of national issues and global concerns, so that we
become citizens of Marshall McLuhan's "Global Village."
As
Marshall McLuhan noted, each medium has its own grammar and codifies
reality in its own particular way. Different media will report the same
event, but create different impressions and messages.
Just
as we notice the pleasing rhythms of certain pieces of poetry or prose,
so we ought to be able to enjoy the pleasing forms and effects of the
different media.
