Question: How much would it cost for hours of TV publicity and major highways, waterways, and public transportation to be shut down?
Answer: Well, if you ask Aqua Teen Hunger Force, the answer would be about 9 “Lite•Brite” toys.
Today, online communities provide an effective means to disseminate a message to not only a very large group of people, but also a targeted demographic. Popular communities such as Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube are the dominant groups boasting millions of active registered users each (14 million was the most recent count on Facebook). While organizations have realized the importance of advertising to these communities, there has been a lot of discussion on privacy—more notably with companies looking up potential new employees before hiring them.
An article by Wired News (January, 2007) talks about the Central Intelligence Agency having a Facebook page in the hopes of finding some new college-aged applicants.
Since Facebook has recently opened its doors to anyone with a computer (opposed to its original purpose of only allowing college students with a valid, and verified, college e-mail address) it has also opened the doors to hundreds of thousands of registrants protesting the “New” Facebook (which also includes RSS feeds that announce different activity on your page). Included in this protest were groups that called for a ban on Facebook advertisers.
Are online community users susceptible to these organizations and ads? Do the organizations lose credibility? Does it shed a new light to the targeted demographics? Or does it just add to the clutter as regular users go about their personal business on these sites?
This CNN article made me laugh and then feel depressed about education in the US. It talks about sex appeal used to help boost sales in tutoring, in Hong Kong.
“‘Their long legs are the most beautiful ones in the tutorial industry,’ said Ken Ng, head of Modern Education, one of the city’s biggest tutoring businesses. ‘This is our selling point.’
Sex appeal has become a hot selling point, just as important as teaching ability and knowledge, in Hong Kong’s hypercompetitive world of cram schools — or ‘bou zap se’ in the local Cantonese dialect.”
If this was how it was done in the USA, students might do a lot better.
http://www.cnn.com/2007/EDUCATION/01/21/sexy.tutors.ap/index.html
As a twenty-three year old male having been raised through a time of Shock Jocks, RealityTV, news cameras attached to tanks during war time, and Girls Gone Wild, I should not be shocked by anything. As I studied Advertising and Visual Rhetoric one of the most thrown around terms is “sex sells.” Certainly my demographic is most likely to be guilty of falling for this, but as a steak-loving capitalist, I never thought that I would find myself sitting through a 6-minute PETA video voluntarily. The catch? A cute PETA brunette giving the organization’s annual speech while getting completely naked—all while mocking the State of the Union Address by cross-edited clips of Congress into the speech.
Shameless? Does this dilute PETA’s image? Or is that out-weighed by people like me that sat through the entire video that never would have before.
Because of it’s graphic nature, I won’t provide the actual video, but you can view it here: http://www.peta.org/feat/stateoftheunion/f-stateoftheunion.asp