Final Reverse Engineering project

Original: http://tarazatstudios.com/nucleus/media/2/20070610-Coke-ad.jpg

Wiki project update

The edits are still intact

progress 2

Progress Post 1

Wikipedia entry project

My original plan for this project was to vandalize the Twilight page and to see how long it took for it to be deleted. Apparently many people had the same idea as I did, as the Twilight page has been locked and is unable to be edited.

My next idea was to add to the page of former baseball player Jim Rice. Rice played for the Red Sox, and was controversially elected to the Hall of Fame last year. It was controversial due to the fact his statistical output over his career simply was not up to snuff, but after years of the Red Sox PR department chipping away at the voters, he finally got the bare minimum amount of votes and was elected.

What I did was to add some information about why Rice was a bad pick for the HOF. My edit is the last two sentences in the second paragraph.

EDIT, 11/29/09: The edit is still on the Wikipedia page after a couple of days. I have checked every day since the original edit and nothing was even slightly altered.

Midterm Part 2

The "senior moments" focuses on a touchy subject for elderly people without explicitly mentioning senility. I also mentioned the television show that is centered around the pill.

Midterm 1

Throughout one’s life, arguably the most important part is the memories. If everyone and everything were to suddenly disappear; if the world suddenly became empty; the water gone, the ground we walk on blank, the one thing we’d have left are those memories. The loss of those memories is a terrifying proposition, but a possible future invention can solve that. A “memory pill” is being developed that could improve memory or destroy old, painful memories. Such a thing seems like it could market itself, but every product does need help. I would utilize two different marketing techniques to maximize visibility, interest, and business: product placement and emotional branding.

Product placement is a marketing concept that has been greatly vilified in recent years, and with good reason. Product placement is usually awkwardly inserted, and very obvious. It doesn’t help that product placement has greatly increased this decade due to the innovations in DVR technology, which allows viewers to fast forward through commercials. This leads advertisers to buy time on television shows. Characters will drink Coca Cola and drive Toyotas instead of unnamed brands. However, I believe that product placement with the memory pill can be executed much better, due to the nature of the product. A product like food or vehicles feel very forced with regards to plots and flow of the plot. When a person hears that a character is eating at McDonald’s, it is jarring to them. It is obviously bought time, and most people dislike such things. But the beauty of pills is twofold. One is that they usually have very “professional” and medical sounding names. If it isn’t something like procythlathylax, it’s something that doesn’t sound like a brand name like Ritalin. It is less jarring because it doesn’t sound like advertising. Secondly, pills are good things. People can choose not to eat at Burger King or drink Sprite because it’s really bad for them. Pills solve problems, though. Pills are good. So people aren’t offended when they’re mentioned or used in a TV show. Using that as a launching point, the possibilities are endless for product placement, both big and small. Maybe they can be inserted into a medical drama or police procedural. A psychiatrist can prescribe the memory pill to a patient on a show to kill traumatic memories. A cop can give the memory pill to make a witness remember what a criminal looked like. Even bigger than that, center an entire show on the memory pill. Maybe a show with a detective who has short term memory issues that takes the memory pill to help him along the way. Or another detective show with a protagonist who uses the memory pill as a secret weapon to remember evidence he’s collected better. Viewers will be amazed at such an innovation, thinking that it must be TV magic. But the beautiful part is that it will be real, and most importantly, a product that people want to buy.

But why will they want to buy it? That’s where the second marketing technique comes in: emotional branding. Emotional branding is crucial in the marketing of medicine. Medicine usually remedies some sort of emotion. A pill like Percocet on the surface remedies pain. But with the pain goes all the emotions that come with it. Anxiety, depression, anger, all of it is gone. The memory pill is an extremely easy pill to market with emotional branding. The key is nostalgia, and the target market will be middle aged and elderly people. Two types of ads should be released that explicitly exploit these people’s emotions. First is to promote how it will make you remember those long forgotten memories of your youth. For many people, they consider their teen years their peak. Maybe they were the homecoming queen or the captain of the football team, and now they are awash in mediocrity. But we can say that this memory pill can unlock those forgotten tales of youth and let you relive your “peak years.” In other words, this pill will make you forget (about your depressing current reality) by making you remember (your romanticized glory days). The second wave of ads will focus on “senior moments.” Senior moments are of course instances where a person in their middle ages or above will have a short term memory issue and blame it on a “senior moment.” Now, this probably happens to everyone, but paranoia of senility leads to the problem being artificially exacerbated. By attacking “senior moments,” we are in effect offering a fountain of youth, because it in theory will eliminate senility.

The memory pill is an extremely easy product to market, but like most things, it’d probably be marketed wrong. Something as revolutionary as this should not merely be presented in magazines you’d find in a doctor’s office. Using correct product placement and emotional branding, the memory pill could become a worldwide sensation.

Persuaders

• What in "The Persuaders" surprised you (or not)? Name one new thing you learned about marketing or politics from watching the film. Name one new thing you learned about yourself from watching the film, or one thing that the film reiterated about yourself.

When it comes to advertising, nothing really surprises me. I say this as an Advertising major and as an incredibly cynical person. The public, especially the American public, is indulged everyday with advertisements. Our TV shows have advertisements. Our movies have advertisements. We see advertisements when we do research on the internet. We even see it on other people's bodies, in forms of t-shirts and tattoos. The notion that we are oversaturated and numbed to ads isn't exactly a stunning development. 50 years ago, people wore suits and nice pants. Today we wear t-shirts with logos promoting all sorts of things, from music to movies to food. When you walk around campus, you can run into a student passing out flyers for a bar, or a poster for a club. 99% of the time, you also never see anybody taking a good, hard look at any of the ads. With so much clutter, there really is no one thing to focus on.

One thing I learned about advertising in the documentary is that product placement is not simply a company going to a network and asking to be in the show. Rather, it is the other way around, with the networks pitching shows to companies. I'm not sure if I learned anything about myself from this, as I knew most of the things they talked about. Advertising is really no different than any other industry. It's full of sociopaths who only care about the bottom line and themselves, which leads to terrible "outside of the box" things like the Song campaign that tried way too hard, and that nut who used his wacko psychology to explain that people like certain things. Despite the fact I find his results to be repugnant, I have a modicum of respect for Frank Luntz. The way he played with language was startling. The first key that anyone in advertising or marketing needs to realize is that the masses are not nearly as smart as they think they are, and easily manipulated, something Luntz realized immediately.

• "The Persuaders" begins by questioning the increase in the amount of advertising we typically encounter in our daily lives. How would you assess the amount of advertising you see? Too much? Too little? Just right? In your view, what difference does it make to know that people today see much more advertising in their daily lives than people 20 or 30 years ago?

The answer to this is very simple. Yes. Yes yes yes. We are absolutely overloaded with advertising. As mentioned, it's absolutely everywhere. On clothing, on cars, on the things we carry, on the walls, in the skies. Everywhere. And the problem for advertisers is that everyone is trying to stand out. But when everyone tries to standout, nobody stands out. And it gets especially annoying when advertisers are specifically targeting one demographic very hard. For example, during last year's MLB playoffs, they cycled about 5 different commercials nonstop, and most of them targeted older men. A particularly annoying Viagra commercial repeated over and over, and being a person who doesn't need Viagra, I found it unnecessary.

I think comparing it to ads from 20-30 years ago is too short a distance. There was product placement and t-shirts and billboards and all that jazz 20-30 years ago. It wasn't that much different. Looking back about 40-50 years ago is where it gets interesting, because the problem in advertising wasn't the amount, but rather the presentation. Take this incredibly offensive Jell-O commercial: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jCKxWQCs3f0. It's full of racism and stereotyping. While people wore nice, logoless clothing, and there was less advertising overall, advertising was more malcious. Cartoons like The Flintstones pushed cigarettes. Advertisements as a whole were incredibly racist and misogynistic, treating women like objects whose only purpose in life was to serve man. It's quality vs. quantity, and I think that was much more damaging to society than the gigantic amount of advertising we are served up everyday.

Myth of the Photographic Truth

In the first image, we see a woman taking a normal shower. Nothing is wrong.

However, once the uncropped image is revealed, we see an entirely different story. The woman is still taking a shower, but an ominous figure is outside of the shower, waiting to murder her. It immediately goes from a terrifying event to a normal, monotonous part of the day with one simple crop.

Final Image

The Medium is Photoshop

If Photoshop is to be considered a medium, then its contents are the brushes, erasers, filters, text tools, and various image editing tools included.

What Photoshop does to society is create artists out of people who never thought they had any skill, or for that matter people with no skill. It is no longer necessary to splurge on paints and canvasses and lessons to create art. Society can now create works of art on their computers with clicks of the mouse and clacks of the keyboard.

At the same time Photoshop can be a weapon. Not a deadly one, per se, but a mental one. People can use Photoshop's contents as a tool for humiliation. A person's head can be pasted on the body of someone in a degrading position. Collages of hate can be made. In addition, another negative aspect is the issue of Fair Use. People in the internet age take and edit whatever image they please in Photoshop, despite the fact that it may be copyright infringement.

Image Redo

When looking over my original image, the first two things that came to my mind were "tacky" and "amateur." My image really looked like something a 7th grader would do if he were told to do this assignment. I found a more suitable color for the image. The blue does not violate the viewer's eyes like the red and green did. The childish lightning bolts were replaced with the to-the-point arrows in maroon. The white circles were an allusion to clouds, as I wanted to visualize how the sky is the limit with the Ipod Touch's technology. It makes each medium stand out, as well. I did not want to add anything more complex (one idea was to make a web like the internet's web) as I thought it would be too distracting.

The Mediums of the iPod Touch

The iPod Touch is a device that represents all five senses through its different uses. It is a fascinating thing, in that it can represent mediums to the individual and to multiple people through just one of them.

The primary objective of iPods have always been to play music. But "music" is such a restrictive term, as it does not fully encapsulate what kind of communication that the audio files put on an iPod. Of course, music is a fantastic way to broadcast ideas and views to the masses, moreso than speeches and the like. By putting words to a tune, the message that is contained in the song is much more accessible to the public, as it makes it easier to remember and recite. In addition, non-song files can also spread messages to the public. College professors can record lectures and put them up for download. Speeches can be converted into digital files, as can books and radio shows.

In addition, the iPod Touch can also play movie files and downloadable video games, which take the music experience futher. Both forms can take an idea, but are not restricted by being audio only. Movies can display ideas and communication, but they have the added bonus of visuals, which makes explanations easier to convey. The next step up is the video game. Video games take the idea of movies further by allowing the user to interact with its universe.

The Ipod Touch, though, is a multifaceted tool, and in fact is almost a miniature computer. Through different applications, one can communicate with the world, despite the fact the Touch has no microphone. The included internet browser and wi-fi access allows anyone, without even downloading a thing, to communicate with the world. Access to sites like Facebook and Twitter can allow an Ipod Touch user to communicate with the world through text. Downloadable applications can enhance the communication. The Facebook application and Twitter applications can streamline the access to the sites and make communication easier. Other applications like AIM can allow people to directly communicate with other people via text immediately, even if they are on the other side of the world.

So, despite the fact that on a Touch one cannot see or talk to another person, they can still communicate with the world in a number of ways.

Innovative Mediums

1. Text Messaging




2. Internet



3. Video Games