midterm visual component proposal

Since I completed project 1, which included the discussion of upcoming, innovative products, I am (obviously) choosing to make logos for a few of the products that I talked about for the visual component of this project. The logos will be a visual description of what the product does.

I plan to utilize both Illustrator and Photoshop. In Illustrator I will be using the obvious shape tools as well as using text and pathfinders. In Photoshop I will use layers as well as the color and contrast adjustment tools.

I envision my visual components incorporating both text and picture. I do not know exactly what I am going to do yet, but I can see the logos portraying the products' innovativeness.

midterm paper

Sorry, I brought a printed out version to class (which was then canceled). I forgot that it was supposed to be on our blogs.



Brianna Horiuchi
March 22, 2010
Professor Jacobsen
Media Literacy

Our World of Persuasion

We live in a world of advertising and yet advertising companies are having trouble getting through to us. If we live and breathe advertisements, why is this the case? All of this advertising has created clutter, so much so that advertisers are struggling to break through. So what is the solution? There is no one solution to successful advertising, however there are a few techniques that I believe are the best chances of persuading today’s consumers. New product ideas that are currently in the process of becoming realities will soon need to be marketed, and I believe that these techniques will be the answer. These methods of advertising are nothing new, but narrowcasting, branding, and product placement can be successful with the right balance being determined for each specific product.
Whether they are ready to be released into the world or are still in the process of being created, innovative technological products will soon need to be marketed to the public. Because they are new technologies, the advertising method will be crucial to how much success these products achieve. Ubiquitous computing, for example, is becoming a reality as we speak. It connects every moment in our lives to the internet. Nabaztag is an example of this technology being put to use in our homes; common everyday objects can download information from the internet. We can be verbally notified about an e-mail or someone’s Facebook status that we program it to follow.
Another upcoming technology is the microrobotic fly; if this model does what it is supposed to, it will revolutionize search and rescue. Its purpose is to be able to fly into the small crevices between the rubble that is the result of some sort of disaster like, say, an earthquake. Its sensor can search for movement or heat or some other indicator of a human body.
Cleverbot is a new form of artificial intelligence that is supposed to be able to not only relay information and hold a conversation, but also borrows from each conversation it had to better the current one. Since this product is open to the general public, I was able to actually try this one out for my experimental purposes. I found that it does not change its answers for similar types of questions. On two accounts I asked, “What should I wear today?” and its response was the same both times. I held two different conversations with my Cleverbot, one of which made no sense while the other was very responsive. The first went something like this:
User: What should I wear today?
Cleverbot: George Segal.
User: Huh?
Cleverbot: Latin America.
User: I am asking what I should wear today?
Cleverbot: What do you want to do?
User: What do you mean? I am asking you what to wear to the party?
Cleverbot: I already told you what I think the meaning of life is.
User: How old is Jennifer Aniston?
Cleverbot: Cry.

In the second conversation, I tried to keep the conversation casual and simple without asking it to relay any facts or opinions. It went a lot more smoothly:

User: How are you doing today?
Cleverbot: I'm great! How about you?
User: Not good. I am crying.
Cleverbot: What is wrong?
User: My boyfriend broke up with me.
Cleverbot: That's just sad. Slap him!

These two conversations went completely different; the first made me believe that this avatar site did not work at all, but the truth was that it just does not work as it is supposed to.
The last and possibly most important technological innovation here is the revolutionized lie detector: brain fingerprinting. This process will help put criminals in jail and prove the wrongly accused to be innocent. Criminals can lie all they want, but this system uses information, specifically memories, from their brains. Whether they admit to committing the crime or not, the criminals’ will give forth evidence of the act whether they mean to or not. All of these new technological innovations are either coming soon or have already been introduced to the public and need advertising assistance.
So what advertising techniques are lingering in the world but maybe not being put to the right use? The first possibility is narrowcasting. This technique targets a specific group of people rather than the general public, but how does one decide which group of people to focus on? Knowing who the prospective consumer of the product is gives the company a great advantage to help advertise to the right demographic. Advertising is pointless and a waste of money if it is reaching out to the wrong audience. Say we are trying to sell Range Rovers; we are not going to air a commercial for them on Nick Jr. Now say we are trying to sell a certain brand of golf clubs; our first-priority audience would be the golfing community, so we might scatter our ads on various country clubs’ golf courses. Narrowcasting helps market the product or service to the right consumers.
Another approach to think about when advertising is branding. This involves creating a culture around your product that makes it appealing to the consumer. A Mac, for example, is much “cooler” than a PC because they have created that type of aura to surround them as a result of their sleek and modern designs along with their advertising. They portray the Mac as a young, good looking, “cool” guy while the representative of the PC is an old, overweight, nerdy guy. This is a successful example of branding a company, while Song seemed to me to fail miserably. Watching the launch of Song, a branch of Delta Airlines, in The Persuaders was pretty funny to me because they, in my eyes, completely missed the point. They tried so hard to create this culture around the product that they forgot to mention what they were selling. Now I know that they did not forget to mention it and that it was their choice to leave it out of their advertisements, but the old man who walked into a Song information center still did not even know what the product actually was. How could it have actually been considered successful when people do not even know what they are being sold? This is a perfect example of how the perfect marketing strategy needs to consist of the perfect balance in order to be successful.
Product placement is another method of marketing a product. This puts the product out there in society so that it becomes a part of life rather than an advertisement. Product placement is used greatly within the movie industry. In fact, a Sex and the City episode, an entire episode, was created just so that Absolut Vodka could advertise its product on the show. Viewers thought that they were just watching another 30-minute episode of Sex and the City, but in reality they were watching a 30-minute advertisement. This is a genius technique for marketing a product; this example shows exactly how product placement should work. It becomes a part of society, a part of culture, without the public actually even consciously realizing it. The idea of advertising in Second Life supposedly never took off, so this method of product placement, marketing real-life products in a virtual world, was a failure. However, what if instead of advertising in the virtual reality of Second Life, the products had been advertised in a different virtual reality like the computer game called Sims. This game is not only much more popular, but it is also not used for business. Techniques for marketing a product do not have to be new and innovative like the product itself, but maybe the already used techniques need to be utilized in a different way.
So then how do we take these techniques and use them to market the new technological innovations? Applying these techniques to create advertising success requires balance. For example, brain fingerprinting is a product that should not be advertised on TV commercials or strategically placed in motion pictures. The target audience for this particular product is the people of the criminal justice system. They are the ones that will be using it, and therefore they are the ones that need to be warmed up to the idea of using the contents of criminals’ brains as evidence. On the other hand, a product like Nabaztag can and should be introduced to the general public. Anyone who has a busy life should be made aware of this product – so basically every American over 13 years old. Now that the company knows who to advertise to, it needs to know where to advertise it. Product placement is essential for this product unlike brain fingerprinting because of the predicted typical consumers. Since the predicted consumer for Nabaztag is the general public, it can and should be snuck into episodes of TV shows and scenes in movies. The last step of advertisement of this product is to create a “cool” culture about the product. This, along with the other aspects, is crucial to its advertisement success. Branding this product will be most beneficial if it took place in the commercials aired on television.
The advertising industry is struggling to stay above water; companies are searching for the new strategy to “break through the clutter.” But in reality, it is not a completely new technique that is needed, but rather a revamping of the old techniques. Balancing the methods of advertising is the true answer to how new and innovative technological products need to be marketed in order to be welcomed into the everyday life of today’s consumers.




Outline (does not count as a page of the paper... just so you can follow my train of thought)
Intro
New Innovative Technologies
Ubiquitous Computing
Nabaztag
Microrobotic Fly
Cleverbot
Research this – try it out so I can really have an opinion
Brain Fingerprinting
Advertising Techniques
Narrowcasting
Branding
Product Placement
How the Techniques can be applied to advertise the Mentioned Products
Brain Fingerprinting
Narrowcasting – criminal justice system
No product placement
No branding
Nabaztag
Narrowcasting – general public
Product placement – movies and TV shows
Branding – “cool” and modern culture
Conclusion

adobe illustrator assignment

original...

my illustrator version...

midterm proposal

Project 1: Future Techniques of Persuasion

I am a business administration major with a concentration in marketing and minor in advertising, so I thought that this project really spoke to me in terms of my interests. I plan to use the website that you have provided and pick a few of the products that have not yet become popular and create my own marketing techniques using what we have learned in class from "The Persuaders." I plan on doing research on some of the big advertisement firms and see how they market their products and try to bring these products from the videos to society.

"The Persuaders" Questions/Responses

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.

To be quite honest, a lot surprised me from “The Persuaders.” Being new to the world of marketing and advertising, I am only aware of the obvious methods of advertising like commercials and billboards and magazine ads. I knew that product placement existed as well, but I was surprised to hear that advertising companies go so far as to scope out movies and TV shows before they are even developed. The “Sex and the City” example that showed how “Absolut” had HBO create an entire episode that revolved around an advertising scheme. It is incredible how “Absolut” did not only plan to advertise their product on the hit TV series, but they planned to create an episode for this product. That, to me, was surprising and genius. It works out for both parties in the deal, so how can they afford to say no? Moving to another point, I think that companies that try to surround their product and/or brand with a certain culture and attitude are on the right track. However, I also believe that, especially in the case of Delta Airlines’s branch called “Song,” companies focus too much on creating that spirit and forget about the simple advertisement. In this instance, the advertisements for “Song” directed the consumers’ attention to how the company was harmonious and could relate to women’s needs and forgot to mention what exactly they were advertising – an airline. The man that was talking to a representative at a “Song” information store had no idea what the company was exactly. Isn’t the whole purpose of advertising/marketing to tell the consumer not only why they should buy the product, but also what the product is they are buying?

If there was one thing I learned from this documentary on marketing techniques of the modern age, it is how susceptible I am to the advertising schemes in society. This response, for me, kind of also flows into the next question, so see that answer as well. But basically, advertising is all around me and sometimes I am not even aware that I am falling into an advertising trap. The diversity and abundance of methods of marketing have become so integrated into society that sometimes only our subconscious is noticing them, which is not a bad thing because then we end up buying the product due to the fact that it was still instilled in our minds.

"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?

I agree that advertising is literally everywhere, even though we may not be aware of it. We are even being advertised to in our own home. Companies will do almost anything to get us to think about their product. If evaluating the amount of advertising we see in our everyday lives, I would definitely not say it is too little. Many people would say that there is too much advertising today solely because there is much more than there was 20 or 30 years ago. However, I think that companies are just trying to keep up with the technology and the new opportunities they are given. This does not necessarily mean that there is not too much of it though. Let’s just say that I lie somewhere between too much and just right. Society does not oppose or prohibit the amount of advertising going on today; in fact we succumb to it. The high exposure that we have to advertising really does have an influence on the way that we see a product or a brand. I do not think that the fact that we have more marketing techniques and are being exposed to many more ads everyday than the people were of 20 or 30 years ago really makes much of a difference. Like I said, companies are trying to not fall behind in terms of the technological opportunities they have today. Advertisers of 20 or 30 years ago did not have the chance to advertise on websites or Facebook. I think that advertising has just progressed along with technology.

Digital Nation (part II)

These segments of Digital Nation showed aspects of technology that I did not know even existed. What was most surprising to me was the "Second Life" program that could have the potential of being integrated into the business world.
The program is basically a grown-up version of the “Sims” gaming series. The avatars in the “Second Life” program allow business companies to cut the cost of flying their employees to, say, Beijing for a business meeting or negotiation. It is astonishing that someone from Hong Kong can have a formal-attire business meeting with an employee from Australia, England, India, and the United States all from the comfort of his/her own home while sitting in the kitchen in his/her pajamas. I can see why this would be very beneficial to the companies as well as their employees, and I think that it is great that big companies like IBM are finding creative ways to utilize the technology that is available to them. It just came as such a shock to me that technology has really come this far. I think that this part of the video was a sort of reality shock for me because I had never actually took the time become aware of all the different technologies are involved in my everyday life that was not here say 50 or so years ago – TV, internet, cell phone, iPod, GPS, computer games, video games, etc. If I had realized that I as an individual was so in tune with technology, maybe I could have imagined what was available to big companies like IBM and seen something like this coming. It is unfortunate that employee teamwork may no longer be face-to-face and that people at a business meeting may never actually meet the others, but this does not mean that this form of technology is bad. This “Second Life” program may have the opportunity to revolutionize the business world, and its impacts will be great.

Another point I wanted to make concerned the segment about teaching through technology. I believe that teachers hit the nail on the head when they recognize that students today do not learn in the same manner as kids did a decade or two or three ago. It is not that our generation is a dumb generation, but rather that we have been introduced to new potential distractions need to be lured to learning with a method of teaching other than just the traditional lecture. I agree with Katie Salen (from the video) when she says that video games can have the same potential as books when used correctly. The internet is a great thing, and I fully support integrating it into the school curricula more than it has been in the past. I think that people stigmatize the technology of the internet and video games because they are afraid that we will not be able to control it. That should not be a concern if we add technology education and utilization of educational video games to the curriculum from the very beginning of one’s education. For now, I side myself with those who believe that the internet and video games and other forms of technology have a positive effect on society.