A resource we really love on this topic is the “The Product Is You” section of the New York Times Magazine’s Murketing blog. The section contains many more examples of “selling” an audience to potential ad placers. Compare a few of them — how are different audiences being talked about? What about them is being emphasized?
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Tag Archives: Media industry
Lesson Resources – For Teh Lulz
By the time you’re reading this, the statistics in this episode will have changed a lot; for example, Muzak is now out of bankruptcy again. These statistics were accurate when we produced the episode:
- Viacom’s profit fell 70% in the last quarter of 2008;
- 525 magazines had gone out of business in 2008;
- 19 of the top 25 magazines saw a drop in sales in 2009;
- the number of ads purchased in magazines dropped by 26% in the first quarter of 2009;
- the publisher of the game Mortal Kombat filed for bankruptcy;
- comics publishers were worried what ebook readers like the Kindle would do to their profits;
- 2009 saw no new TV pilots being produced in New York;
- Readers Digest and dozens of other major publications cut jobs like crazy, with major news outlets like Newsweek cutting bureaus;
- there is no doubt that broadcast television networks are still considering abandoning free broadcasts in favor of subscription models;
- and Columbia Journalism School president Nicholas Lehmann’s suggestion that the New York Times might go bankrupt, while it has not yet come to pass, was made (along with several suggestions from other scholars and journalists that a trust of some sort should be set up for journalism) at the Changing Dynamics of Public Controversies conference of the J school’s communications colloquium in 2009.
Lesson Resources – Billboard Ads: Pay What You Owe Us!
A number of advertising companies which dominate Times Square have websites you and your students can look at to think about how much the ads cost, exactly where they are located, and strategies for reaching Times Square visitors. Among these companies are Sherwood Outdoor, Spectacolor, and of course Van Wagner Communications. We actually did try to calculate an accurate CPM (cost per thousand) for ads seen in home movies using the costs listed by these sites and additional online resources for CPM calculation. You can try running your own with your students! You might also try using Google Maps’ StreetView function to look around the area and figure out where these companies’ billboards are located, look up the names of other billboard companies (check the names at the bottoms of most billboards), discuss the success of different tactics, or talk about how many ads you can see in Times Square.
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Lesson Resources – Product Placement
Advertising Age magazine is a great resource for learning more about specific tactics the ad industry uses. We recommend using these articles to help students attend to the specific tactics advertisers think will work, the way they think about their audiences, and the language they use to describe their work.
Here’s a ton of articles and other resources about product placement. If the links don’t show you a whole article, try doing a search for the title at your local library using LexisNexus or a similar resource.
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