Current exhibits include: “Ads from the past: Coca Cola”. This fascinating museum is a gem in Milwaukee’s Third Ward, and at $5.00 a bargain as well.
Category: Advertising
Mainstream Media: The Morning After
Listening to NPR this morning, I was somewhat amazed to hear this assertion during the top of the hour news: “stock futures opened lower today, not due to the election, but rather the weak economy“. How in the world do they have any idea? Personally, it must be the warmer than usual November Midwest weather 🙂
The market was up on election day.
Television will be the first traditional media medium to fall
The move away from traditional, or mainstream media is currently accelerating as more and more people switch to the internet for their information and entertainment. Sales of newspapers are declining, radio advertising is down, and television viewers are switching off in record numbers.
It’s popular in the blogopshere to argue that newspapers will eventually fall, and radio is hardly popular. However, given the current marketplace, television will be the first traditional media medium to completely fail, where as radio has some life left in it yet. Newspapers will survive, but the newspaper of tomorrow will be markedly different.
The great Television switch off
The television switch off is real. In the United States, 2.5 million viewers switched off in the spring on 2008 compared to the same time in 2006. Statistically this is only a small percentage of the overall viewing audience, but among those still watching television, the amount of television they watch each day is declining.
The decline in television viewing is stronger among younger statistical groups. In Europe, a 2005 study from the European Interactive Advertising Association found almost half of 15- to 24-year-olds are watching less TV in favor of browsing the web. A study reported in The Guardian in 2007 headlined with “Young networkers turn off TV and log on to the web.” The television switch off in the United States among younger people has seen the average age of a TV viewer increase to 50.
Five Ways Newspapers Botched the Web
Here’s our theory: Daily deadlines did in the newspaper industry. The pressure of getting to press, the long-practiced art of doom-and-gloom headline writing, the flinchiness of easily spooked editors all made it impossible for ink-stained wretches to look farther into the future than the next edition. Speaking of doom and gloom: Online ad revenues at several major newspaper chains actually dropped last quarter. The surprise there is that they ever managed to rise. The newspaper industry has a devastating history of letting the future of media slip from its grasp. Where to start? Perhaps 1995, when several newspaper chains put $9 million into a consortium called New Century Network. “The granddaddy of _______,” as one suitably crotchety industry veteran tells us, folded in 1998. Or you can go further back, to ’80s adventures in videotext. But each tale ends the same way: A promising start, shuttered amid fear, uncertainty, and doubt.
The Art of Satire
Propaganda Is Now Officially Hip
“An interesting Metafilter discussion on Obama campaign graphics.” (Via Design Observer.)
I’ll note, however, that propaganda has been hip for at least 40 years. All you have to do is check out a book like War Posters: Weapons of Mass Communications and you’ll fine that through WWII, most of the graphic propaganda is put out by governments and their supporters and is mostly patriotic and pro-military (whichever country or military that might be).
The death and life of the American newspaper
The American newspaper has been around for approximately three hundred years. Benjamin Harris’s spirited Publick Occurrences, Both Forreign and Domestick managed just one issue, in 1690, before the Massachusetts authorities closed it down. Harris had suggested a politically incorrect hard line on Indian removal and shocked local sensibilities by reporting that the King of France had been taking liberties with the Prince’s wife.
It really was not until 1721, when the printer James Franklin launched the New England Courant, that any of Britain’s North American colonies saw what we might recognize today as a real newspaper. Franklin, Benjamin’s older brother, refused to adhere to customary licensing arrangements and constantly attacked the ruling powers of New England, thereby achieving both editorial independence and commercial success. He filled his paper with crusades (on everything from pirates to the power of Cotton and Increase Mather), literary essays by Addison and Steele, character sketches, and assorted philosophical ruminations.
Has the Pyramid Inverted?
The term media has many different definitions. Published media is any media made available to the public. Mass media refers to all means of mass communication. Broadcast media refers to communications delivered over mass electronic communication networks.
News media refers to mass media focused on communicating news. Media meshing refers to the act of combining multiple independent pieces of communication media to enrich an information consumer’s experience. New media refers to media that can only be created or used with the aid of modern computer processing power.
The history of “media” has been designed, developed and pushed from a few at the top to the masses at the bottom. This model has been used to influence public opinion about anything, everything and everywhere. The old model was an important factor in driving historical economies.
What I learned about network television at Dateline NBC.
The most memorable reporting I’ve encountered on the conflict in Iraq was delivered in the form of confetti exploding out of a cardboard tube. I had just begun working at the MIT Media Lab in March 2006 when Alyssa Wright, a lab student, got me to participate in a project called “Cherry Blossoms.” I strapped on a backpack with a pair of vertical tubes sticking out of the top; they were connected to a detonation device linked to a Global Positioning System receiver. A microprocessor in the backpack contained a program that mapped the coördinates of the city of Baghdad onto those for the city of Cambridge; it also held a database of the locations of all the civilian deaths of 2005. If I went into a part of Cambridge that corresponded to a place in Iraq where civilians had died in a bombing, the detonator was triggered.
When the backpack exploded on a clear, crisp afternoon at the Media Lab, handfuls of confetti shot out of the cardboard tubes into the air, then fell slowly to earth. On each streamer of paper was written the name of an Iraqi civilian casualty. I had reported on the war (although not from Baghdad) since 2003 and was aware of persistent controversy over the numbers of Iraqi civilian dead as reported by the U.S. government and by other sources. But it wasn’t until the moment of this fake explosion that the scale and horrible suddenness of the slaughter in Baghdad became vivid and tangible to me. Alyssa described her project as an upgrade to traditional journalism. “The upgrade is empathy,” she said, with the severe humility that comes when you suspect you are on to something but are still uncertain you aren’t being ridiculous in some way.
Pre-Movie Theatre Ads Now $450M Business
In-theater ads hit $456 million in 2006, up 15% from 2005, says the Post, citing a report by the Cinema Advertising Council. For perspective, this is about the size of Viacom’s “digital” revenue. The head of the council, Cliff Marks, who also happens to be head of sales for the public play in the sector, National Cine-Media (NCMI, see below), says that the introduction of digital projectors is helping spur adoption, as advertisers no longer have to burn ads onto film.