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Looking Back

            Over the past semester, I have slowly become aware of how much media I consume. I directly consume around three or four hours of media every day through social media or going on to the internet or related things. But even this doesn’t even begin to show the media exposure I have through indirect methods, such as guerrilla advertisement. But, the overall effect of this media on my life is that the media begins to almost build up a culture of its own around me, surrounding me with ideas that benefit the media rather that society. It desensitize me to certain things, as shown in the Miss Representation documentary, and it can also cause me to have positive reactions to certain things, even if they don’t actually mean anything to me.             But, my awareness of the media around me and the techniques they use will help me to look at situations the media presents to me and actually analyze them to see if they make any sense. This will primarily help with advertising and
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Disney: God of the Media

            In today’s society, only a few areas of media still retain a true fandom with millions of followers. Some of these fandoms include Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings and Star Wars, just to name a few. Each one of these concepts hold tremendous influence over most inside the fandom, meaning that each one of these concepts hold a large amount of societal influence. And Disney owns three of these fandoms             The first one of these is Marvel. Marvel has the largest fandom of any series that is still active, meaning that they can implement any messages they want into Marvel and its movies and millions will view this message worldwide. Marvel is one of the few companies that still has the abilities to create new stereotypes in its movies, which is massive today. Whether they use this power for good or for bad, it doesn’t change the fact that Marvel wields this kind of power, and by logic, so does Disney.             Another one of these companies is Lucasfilms, sim
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Miss Representation

Recently, I watched a documentary titled Miss Representation. The documentary detailed how women are portrayed in todays media and delivered a very compelling message about how the media portrayal of women must change in order to make true progress in todays society. They detailed this using many statistics about women in power and on television, as well as using actual examples of how women were degraded live on television. It also did a very good job of describing how women were mistreated in media, particularly through advertisement, and some of the ads they used as examples truly made me feel horrible. This documentary delivered an incredibly powerful message overall, and while I am in full support of everything it is advocating for, I believe that the documentary could have gone a better direction in terms of creating the ad.             First of all, in many of the examples used with how women are portrayed negatively on the news and in politics, at least half and probably mo
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Jerseys: The Hidden Jackpot in Sports

Sports and Athletics have become major parts of today’s society. From basketball to soccer, there is a large amount of sports played across the globe. Not only this, but there are many different levels of these sports, such as college and professional. Many people devote their lives to these sports, becoming involved on some level or another. But most watch from the sidelines, cheering on their favorite team, wearing a jersey or team jacket. That is the focus for today: Jersey’s. Now, everyone knows about traditional jersey marketing, like the company putting their logo on the shirt to reinforce their product or something along those lines. But what many people don’t realize is where the money goes when they buy their product. Some may believe that the money goes directly to the player, some believe the money goes to the team, but the fact of the matter is that most of the money goes to whichever company has hade a deal with that branch of the sport. In sports such as soccer, indiv
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Tony Stark: Marvel's Mook

Over the past decade, Marvel Studios has become one of the most dominant forces in our society. They bring their movies into the spotlight of the world, creating some of the highest earnings the world has ever seen. Currently, every one of their movies has generated at least 500 million in the box office, save The Hulk and Captain America: The First Avenger. Because of this widespread publicity and power, Marvel holds sway over much of population, particularly younger generations. And it has taken this power well, helping racial discrimination with movies such as Black Panther as well as gender discrimination with many female heroes and Captain Marvel coming out later this year. These things are all amazing, but they are not the topic of todays blog. That honor belongs to the concepts of the Midriff and the Mook and what Marvel has done with these concepts. With the Midriff, Marvel has almost avoided the topic entirely, with no female characters jumping out as apparent Midriffs.
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Pharma: The Lives Lost behind the Advertising You See

The pharmaceutical industry has become one of the largest aspects of our everyday life. This industry has developed hundreds of life-saving drugs, curing diseases that were formerly a death sentence to anyone who had them, such as Hepatitis C and Tuberculosis. These same companies have also developed some of the drugs that many use on a daily basis, such as Tylenol. There is no denying that these companies have had an immeasurable positive impact on the world with millions of lives saved worldwide as well as millions more cured of previously chronic diseases. But how many more lives could this industry save if they didn’t spend so much money of advertising? A study from 2013 found that 9 of the top 10 pharmaceutical companies spend more on marketing and advertising than they did on research and development. In fact, the biggest company, Johnson and Johnson, spend a little of two times more money on marketing (17.8 billion dollars) than they did on actual research and development (8
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The Prophecies Behind Oracle

Have you ever heard of Oracle? Possibly, as it now has its name branded onto a sports arena. However, before this time, it wouldn’t be a bad guess to assume that you have never heard of Oracle before that point in time. And if you hadn’t heard of Oracle at all, well, its likely one of the biggest companies you’ve never heard of. Why? Because it’s a company that you don’t see advertising, it’s the company that helps create the advertisements you see. It’s a data mining company.             Now you may be asking yourself “What’s a data mining company?” Well, a data mining company is a company that takes your information, for example what car you bought this year, what you looked up on Google yesterday or what you watched on Netflix last month, and sells this information to companies looking to create an advertisement specialized towards you. This type of advertising is called “narrowcasting”, and it is the idea that certain ads are created with a specific demographic group in mind
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