Absolut Stunning

Clearly, many talented students have worked their way through Creative Message Strategy this term. Although they've created ads in a variety of media for such products as Nutella, Ray-Bans, Mexicali Grill (local restaurant), these simple ads may actually pose the biggest challenge.

Please view but 3 examples of Absolut ads [& 3 manipulated photos of those ads by me!] The ads are directed at 35+ with emphasis on older segment of the target audience. Tone, witty, sophisticated. Feel free to offer your comments? Post them below.

Iranian Rapper Hich-Kas

Here is Iranian rap artist, Hich-kas, rapping without music, free style.

And here is a highly produced rap from the same artist.

Quick & Easy Illustration & Photo Manipulation Apps

Creating an ad, a presentation or just want to have some fun? Here are the names of some illustration & photo manipulation apps and a few examples of results: iMajiCam--take photos with many different filters, PhotoStudio--crop & manipulate photos from your camera roll, ArtStudio--someone described it as a mini PhotoShop in which you can import & manipulate photos or draw pictures & apply tools to them on screen, RetroCam--the first one I tried, fun but not as robust as the others. I chose the examples randomly & just to give an idea, albeit very partial, of the actual results achieved.

Wag the Dog

The media manufacture a war, create a folk hero, and save a scandal-plagued presidency when a Hollywood producer and a Washington spin-doctor get in bed together.

I'm showing it to the Mass Communication pro-seminar this week. View this 4 minute clip and check out Internet Movie Database to learn more.

Advertising: raw, cooked, incorporated

Here is a very brief description of one of the projects I'm working on. It considers what available stock of meanings are brought to bear by advertising as a form of historically situated communication. Advertising is a kind of double-communication since it sends messages per se and it supports other messages publication. One key assumption is that the separation between content & audience in mass communication research is false or at least misleading; a tight structural relationship exists between the two.

The nature of advertising: raw, cooked, incorporated

A growing consensus suggests that a global ecological crisis impacts every facet of human society. The recent oil rig explosion and consequent spill in the Gulf of Mexico sent crude oil gushing into the waters, killing 12 oil rig workers as well as marine wildlife, putting fishermen out of work, devastating the tourism industry and other negative occurrences. Although the disaster was watched with horror, the US remained divided over the wisdom of further drilling and indeed whether there is an ecological crisis or not.

Mass media, as has been richly established, contributes to the formation of public opinion through its agenda setting, and other functions. But most commonly advertising’s ability to persuade or set an agenda has been relegated to its primary intention, i.e. to promote products and services.

This research assumes that advertising has an educational function related to the formation of public opinion that exists separately from its promotional function. It explores how advertising educates one section of the population, women between their teen years to over 40, about the role of nature in their social and cultural milieu. The research focuses on magazine advertising, treating ads as sections in a textbook, the textbook being the magazine which performs a highly complex set of educational practices and the ads which both compliment the editorial content and add to it.

Please return to the blog for updates on this project.

A Face in the Crowd--Trailer

I showed A Face in the Crowd to my graduate proseminar in mass communication.

It's a classic film about the power of media, the transition from radio to television, Andy Griffith' first film, Lee Remick's first film and also starring Walter Matthau, Patricia Neal, Tony Franciosa. Watch this trailer, scroll down 1 blog entry for the clip about new approaches to advertising, and seek out the film on DVD. Well worth the time, I promise you!

Face in the Crowd--Advertising Vitajex

In this clip from film A face in the crowd, a new harder-sell approach to advertising on the relatively new medium, television, is promoted. This movie, Andy Griffith' first, is well worth seeking out. View it with friends who study mass media, advertising, public opinion, or film!

The Duck Takes to the Airwaves

In the last few entries, you'll find the presentations & creative work of ADPR 3110 [Advertising Message Strategy] students. Those entries show off their print executions.

In this entry, listen to the :60 second radio spot created by Emmy Johnson & Jonathan Joiner for Duck Brand Duct Tape. You can view their presentation on "Roushanzamir" channel on YouTube.

Congratulations, Loren Saxton

Loren Saxton's Master's thesis, "Katrina's Story: a narrative analysis of news coverage and FEMA's crisis response strategies," was successfully defended on April 14, 2010. Please wish her well as she enters her doctoral program at the Grady College, University of Georgia--Athens.


Brief description of findings: Grounded theory suggests that as levels of categorization and analysis progress, new research questions emerge. Indeed, rather than establishing a link between news releases and news articles that conveyed a shift in crisis response strategies relative to the emergence of Katrina's narrative, this study identified consistencies in language, tone and themes within news articles and news releases. This study revealed that after Katrina, the functions of public relations and journalism were similar: both emphasized Katrina's effects on national and local economies, while ignoring inherent social divisions based on race and class.

Photo caption: Loren Saxton with friend

Creativity?

image from http://www.benefitcosmetics.com
click image to read text

Is advertising a creative enterprise? It's certainly a commercial one. Add creativity + commercialism; what's the answer?

Michael Schudson suggested Capitalist Realism as a way to conceptualize advertising and, by extension, a great deal of the creative work[mass] produced post-20th century. Capitalist realism evokes the concept "socialist realism" a stream of creative production associated with the USSR. [for those to young to remember, Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.]

Where does capitalist realism [top-down communication] end and self-expression [bottom-up communication] begin? Are there boundaries, are boundaries blurred?

These are questions to which I hope to receive answers [readers' versions of answers] in response to this blog entry.

I look forward to your input. Your friend, e

Just watch & listen

read me

Roushanzamir, Elli Lester. "Peering through the Crack & Good-bye to all that: 30 years of TV, telephones, sports, drugs, etc." in Qualitative Inquiry, 15:1, 229-246.

Discussion to come; check back soon.

Yes We Can

Barak the Vote. A campaign that appeals to first time voters, and especially young voters (18 years old),but also to those 80+. Yes, we can. Every vote counts; witness that 2 days post election the state of North Carolina fell into the Obama side. Yes, we can. Cross generations, people of color, white, disabled, not disabled, gay, straight,men, women, class. Yes, we can.Exuberance. Sacrifice. Yes, we can. We all must act; Yes, we can. It's our choice; Yes, we can.

A video that promotes and helps to empower us with humor inflected with a pointed instruction. Yes, we can.

And follow this link for another beautiful example of political advertising.[click on the word LINK]

Yes, we can.

Wither Structuralism?

Structuralism is a theoretical project that analyzes, not hidden meanings, but the systematic rules which govern the social formation & are encoded into social artifacts. As a structuralist, for example, Roland Barthes analyzed a wide variety of texts in Mythologies: the world of wrestling, the face of Garbo, neither-nor criticism, and so forth. [I have tried to emulate Barthes in the previous entry.] As Barthes explains, "[m]ythical speech is made of a material which has already been worked on so as to make it suitable for communication....myth in fact belongs to the province of general science, coextensive with linguistics, which is semiology." Semiology: the science of signs.

To be more specific myth refers to an unacknowledged series of concepts through which a culture comes to understand itself. It helps naturalize all aspects of culture: political, economic, social, etc.

However, have structuralism and semiotics/myth as concepts been written out of critical theory? In New Keywords: a revised vocabulary of culture and society structuralism, semiotics and myth don't appear.

Has the power of structuralism as a theoretical perspective withered, or have intellectuals in their desire to be up-to-date, dug it up only to discard it in favor of post-structuralism and/or postmodernism? I think the answer to this question is "yes," and I would argue that it's a loss for understanding the relationships between the exercise of power and the dominant ideology of a given social formation.

For a bibliographic essay on structuralism with many links to relevant online sources click here. And for another great web resource see this semiotics site which I found cited on Sobhan Rezaee's Culture and Communication blog.

Where in the whirl is Matt Lauer

Mythologies: I offer this brief essay as a Barthian mythology which will be followed in my next entry by a discussion of Roland Barthes' version of semiotics. Since I've never attempted this form, please accept it for what it is, an emulation of one who has greatly influenced my own research.


Matt Lauer, co-host of the Today Show, NBC-TVs AM news & entertainment show which boasts the highest ratings in its time slot, encapsulates the Ideal Male 21st century. Boy next door who made good as measured by impeccable clothing sense, beautiful former-model wife, a serious news reader and a playful soul whose Where in the World is Matt Lauer enlarges him to the status of World Citizen.

As he travels the beauty spots of the world, his back drop is his applauding fans. As metro-sexual New Yorker he's thin & neat but married so clearly, publically hetero-sexual.

He has no sharp edges, no angst and has perfected the news-readers quality of moving from human tragedy to slightly irreverent human interest seamlessly. He offers no opinions.

Unlike Hollywood celebrities, Matt Lauer invites us to share his celebrity status, reassures us when times are bad, and kids around every day whatever else happens.

Continuity, reassurance, success, desirable man, he's both a large public figure and the same as us: Matt Lauer is the fashion statement of American society. He is a norm by which we can measure ourselves and a non-judgemental friend.

Where in the whirl of American life is Matt Lauer? He exists at the circumference binding together a social formation the likes of which is as intensely personal as it is expansively global.

Content Analysis/Textual Analysis

Content analysis, rather obviously, examines the content of something: newspaper article, newspaper as a whole, advertising images, and so forth. Until recently, content analysis involved counting certain aspects that met specific criteria: news stories that referred to Native Americans as Indians.

More recently something called textual or discourse analysis has emerged, the principal adherent and promoter of which is T. A. van Dijk. In numerous articles & books van Dijk has encouraged what he calls discourse analysis as a kind of literary analysis of the words on the page (visuals, etc). As such it enriches traditional content analysis but falls within the same paradigm of knowledge, with all its strengths and shortcomings.

A word[s] about paradigms of knowledge.

American social science traditionally falls into the pluralist society/dominant paradigm. In which, the real world is known and measured through sense perceptions, power is understood as diffused among different groups with competing interests. These perceptions, distorted they may be, ultimately reflect reality. Ideology is understood without its capital letter, as a political spectrum, a series of individual beliefs.

A critical cultural paradigm views ideology as reproductive practices, not only a belief but a tool. Reality cannot be known directly, but rather it is the effects of reality that can be measured. Power is viewed as hegemonic, a powerful few shaping reality. The nature of the social formation is one of monopoly of power the the consent of the many.

Working within a critical cultural paradigm changes the the definition of text and the focus of analysis. A critical textual analysis is not concerned with content per se but with the evidence a text provides of social practices. The text, which is an abstraction, is defined by the researcher, studied less for its social effets and more for "the subjective or cultural forms that it realizes and makes available." [Johnson] The analysis provides documentation not of "underlying" or "latent" meanings, but of regimes of meaning[s] that construct the texts surface. [Rose] Thee regimes privilege certain ways of knowing while they marginalize others.

See these references: Richard Johnson, "What is cultural studies , anyway? Social Text 16:38-80 and Rose, Gillian. Visual methodologies. 2001 New York: Vintage.

For an application of critical textual analysis see my paper:
"Chimera Veil of 'Iranian Woman' and Process of U.S. Textual Commodification: how U.S. print media represent Iran," Journal of Communication Inquiry 28:1, 9-28, 2004.

What is a Text? More to come. Paradigms of knowledge? More to come. Please feel free to offer your opinions to those expressed here. And please do return to my blog.

Forthcoming, Qualitative Inquiry

“Peering Through the Crack & Good-Bye to All That:30 years of TV, Telephones,Sports, Drugs, Etc.”

Social relationships are enacted and remembered through interpersonal relationships and replayed through the media as the author uses a defining personal experience, that of her son’s drug addiction, to rethink, analyze, and resituate

herself in the world. The result draws attention to the messy juxtaposition of social structures and policies with personal loss, grief, anger, and episodes of joy and courage. Crack, whether drug, fissure, gibe, highlights remembered fragments which allow the author to tell her stories in ways other than those originally considered. As those personal stories are interwoven with public moments such as school desegregation and changes in telecommunications and popular culture, a social commentary is offered that defamiliarizes the familiar, evokes rather than represents, and therefore offers the reader entry into the narrative, the cultural critique.

X-cultural, -generational, -format, -genre, -time

Here I am, Elle Lester Roushanzamir, standing--in picture at left--next to a Mini Cooper in the Cotswolds, England pretending that the car is mine. Just for fun.

Please return to my blog, Critiques of Media & Culture, from time to time. You're encouraged to leave responses to my entries as I/we explore relationships between media & culture.