My Relationship with Media

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

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

Today I’m here to talk about the decline of what was once and for the moment still is a household brand name: Victoria Secret. In recent years, it has been receiving less and less positive media attention and more and more criticism. Specifically, I’ll be going into depth about why the decline of this company has to do with its advertising and nothing much more than that.  Over recent years, Victoria Secret has suffered because of its ads, which primarily revolve around the sexualization of an individual which are typically women, because of the rise of the “Me Too” era. In todays political atmosphere, it is becoming more and more necessary to think before one acts, and also traditional ways are being thrown out in favor of new, more progressive ways. Now, while this may act in favor for some companies, this new wave is doing no favors for Victoria Secret. This is because for basically all of its existence, Victoria Secret has thrived off of objectifying women and portraying very sexu

Over the past week, I began seeing certain parts of the media where you wouldn’t expect to. Specifically, I saw advertisements in areas I wasn’t expecting. There were two specific instances that come to mind. First, when I was using the restroom in a public bathroom, I looked up and there was an ad. Its not something one really expects to see while using the restroom. The next example that comes to mind is that when I went ice skating on Friday, there was a RT logo beneath the ice. Once again, one doesn’t really expect to look down and see a logo for a company underneath ice, and it definitely does put that company in the back of your mind. This form of advertisement is becoming more and more common, with ads appearing everywhere. This advertisement is called guerilla advertising. Guerilla advertising is essentially putting ads for a company in every public spot available to put an ad in. This means advertising on the actual pavement of the street, public buildings and even advertis

Earlier this week, I read two articles on the same topic and was shocked as to how different two articles on the same story could actually be. Both were about the migrant caravans at the border of the US. This first article can be found here https://www.foxnews.com/world/migrant-caravan-members-may-be-planning-human-stampede-at-us-border-to-provoke-us-aid-group . This article presented the people of the caravans to be overstepping at almost attacking the American people, regularly citing sources of people who are firmly against the caravans and describing the people as “stampeding” and “illegally crossing”. This article, while you could still pick the story out of it, truly focused on a one sided story, which is the story of the people from the town where the migrants set up camp. The story hardly ever talked about why the migrants are here or the living conditions they are in or how long it would take them to cross legally. It simple talked over and over again about how they had see

I have a slightly unhealthy relationship with the media. I say this because I believe that my relationship with media isn't as good as some peoples but also certainly isn't as bad as other peoples'. I also say this because I believe that it is very difficult to have a good relationship with the media. This is because all forms of media a designed to be enticing and created to make you want to spend more time on the platform. Use Instagram as an example. The only way you can have a healthy usage of Instagram would likely be you going on and looking at posts of people that you know and have contact with. However, what ends up happening for me and most other people is that after we look at the posts of people that we know, we soon get distracted by other posts of people that we don't know, or more often random news accounts and comedy pages. This also applies to almost every social media platform such as Facebook or Twitter. Once anyone enters this area on any social med