MC101s: I Salute You with a Squishee

No Duff Beer? What would Homer think?

Today's medianote is the last of the summer session. Let me say that this has been an excellent Mass Comm 101 class. There has been a lot of interesting classroom discussion, academic work has been well above average, and field trip turnout has been impressive.

Now, on to the last medianote of the summer...

One of the more amusing movie marketing gimmicks of the summer has been the conversion of a few 7-11 stores throughout the country into Quik-E-Marts, the fictional convenience store from "The Simpsons." The timing, of course, coincides with next week's opening of "The Simpsons Movie" in theaters.

We talked about this clever way of publicizing the movie and selling some Simpsons-themed merchandise after listening to a National Public Radio story about a controversy that is brewing over who dreamed up this idea.

On a recent early-evening visit to the Burbank Quik-E-Mart, this humble blogger found lines out the front door and a 20-minute wait to get in. The Homer-style doughnuts were a bit much (they appeared to be glazed doughnuts covered with icing and topped with sprinkles), but the Blue Vanilla Squishee was pretty good.

Gabcast! Club MediaNote #68

Big Guys, Little Screens

An article in the Los Angeles Times discussed the National Basketball Association's eight-year, $7.4 billion television and Internet contract. The deal between the NBA and ABC/ESPN/TNT gives the league a healthy raise even though TV audience numbers for professional basketball are going down. The recent NBA Finals between San Antonio and Cleveland, for example, averaged 9.3 viewers per game versus as many as 29 million viewers per game during the heyday of Michael Jordan in the 1990s.

A fair chunk of the $7.4 billion will go for various online rights. Many younger sports fans follow their favorite teams online instead of on TV.

Gabcast! Club MediaNote #67



Our final exam study session on Tuesday was helped considerably by SI Leader Mike Arvizu and a really big pizza.

Volde-Mart

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows will be an enormous event in the world of books when it is released to the public on July 21. Millions of copies have already been reserved, bookstores have planned elaborate all-night Harry Potter parties and Amazon has massive and intricate plans for delivering the book ASAP, but not before the release date.

And yet, acccording to a recent Los Angeles Times story, Potter profits will be peanuts for most American booksellers.

Apparently the book has been so heavily discounted by online booksellers and big box discount stores that few retail outlets are daring to sell it for anything near full price. For Wal-Mart, this is no big deal: Harry Potter is just another loss leader that brings people into the store where they might also pick up a garden hose or underwear. But for struggling-to-survive independent booksellers, cutthroat price-cutting of the biggest seller ever sounds like the work of the evil Lord Voldemort.

Gabcast! Club MediaNote #66

The Anti-Multiplex

An article in the Los Angeles Times discussed Guerilla Drive-In movies, a mildly subversive summer pastime in which a blank wall is used as a movie screen and the public is invited to view movies under the stars, for free.

Warehouse walls, undersides of bridges and other large, flat, empty spaces serve as movie screens. Projection equipment is often powered by a marine battery, or even an idling car.

The Guerilla Drive-In concept is quite popular in Santa Cruz, where audiences often hike or bicycle to a remote outdoor location to watch films. Berkeley-based MobMov has a website that encourages community groups to start their own unofficial, unsanctioned movie screenings under the stars.

The downside (or maybe part of the fun, depending on your point of view) is that in many cases this isn't completely legal.

Gabcast! Club MediaNote #65



***MEDIA SURVEY RESULTS, PART 7-Over the last few weeks, I've been giving you the results of a mass media survey given to all MC101 students with their final exam during the spring semester. Here is how the spring MC101s answered the following survey question...

How will people watch movies in 10 years?
A. People will go to multiplex theaters and watch movies at home, much like today. (39%)
B. Fewer people will go out to the movies; more people will watch movies at home. (35%)
C. People will increasingly watch movies on handheld devices. (26%)


Our last MC101 field trip of the summer session was to the Hollywood Bowl. John Williams--composer of the music for "Star Wars" and many other films--conducted the Los Angeles Philharmonic in a night of movie music.

Pleez, Don't Stop Playing... We'll Show You the Mario Bros. Naked!

The Nielsen Co., which is best known for tracking television ratings, will produce monthly reports on video game usage beginning later this month. Sony will cooperate by helping to collect data from hundreds of thousands of PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Portable users.

What's in it for Sony? According to a recent article in the Los Angeles Times, Sony is looking ahead to the day when advertising inside of game environments becomes a major source of revenue. But to sell those ads in any meaningful numbers, audience numbers have to be verified by a well-respected outside organization such as Nielsen.

But what about privacy? Shouldn't it be between you and your game terminal what you play and how often you play it? A Sony spokesman said that the company will protect privacy by providing data organized by game, not by individual player.

If this takes off, will video games eventually have the equivalent of TV's infamous sweeps periods, where programming goes a little nutty in trying to maximize audiences? How could games get more extreme than they already are?

The Autry National Center is always a well-attended MC101 field trip. This outing on July 10 was no exception.

I'll Have an Album ... To Go!

The future of the recorded music industry looks pretty uncertain. Oh sure, people will continue to listen to music, but how consistently will they pay for it? What will be the format of that music, a digital download, a disk, or something else? And where will be buy that music?

Maybe at a coffee shop or through the purchase of greeting cards or a car. That's the conclusion of a National Public Radio story we listened to about Starbucks, Scion and Hallmark, among others, that are getting into the music business.

Gabcast! Club MediaNote #64



***MEDIA SURVEY RESULTS, PART 6-Over the next several weeks, I'll be giving you the results of a mass media survey given to all MC101 students with their final exam during the spring semester. Here is how the spring MC101s answered the following survey question...

In 10 years, the recording industry
A. Will make most of its profits from CDs enhanced with extras. (6%)
B. Will make most of its profits from legal downloads. (42%)
C. Will make most of its profits from organizing tours and merchandising. (43%)
D. Will be mostly extinct. (9%)

On July 7, we spent a pleasant afternoon at Glendale's Alex Theater.

Life in a Digital Fishbowl

On Thursday, July 5 and oh-so-stylish group of MC101s attended a field trip at the Getty Center.

Facebook, YouTube, Flickr and, of course, MySpace are giving regular folks (such as MC101 students) an unprecedented ability to put their photographs, videos and writing in front of a world full of strangers. This is still such a new phenomenon that we don't know yet how this will play out in the long run for individuals and the larger society.

However, we can make one pretty firm observation: privacy, as your grandparents knew it, is dead. And in some cases we are choosing to invade our own privacy, putting photographic evidence of our youthful excesses out there for all to see.

This medianote comes from a recent Yahoo! News story.

Gabcast! Club MediaNote #63




***MEDIA SURVEY RESULTS, PART 5-Over the next several weeks, I'll be giving you the results of a mass media survey given to all MC101 students with their final exam during the spring semester. Here is how the spring MC101s answered the following survey question...

Is YouTube a passing fad?
A. Yes (26%)
B. No (74%)

Why Does Bono Matter?

Anthropologists from other worlds may conclude that we consider entertainers to be the wisest of our people. What else could they think when they observe actors, singers and others talking about important political issues, and the news media and voters paying attention to them.

This link between showbiz success and political activism was the topic of a recent article in the Calendar Section of the Los Angeles Times. George Clooney was asked about his thoughts on being politically involved.

Gabcast! Club MediaNote #62




Our day of field trips on June 27 ended at the Los Angeles Central Library.

Summer Means Surfing ... Indoors

For generations of American children, summer has meant free time, time to do fun stuff. That meant camp, beach visits, bike rides and other healthy, physical things that are generally good for a growing child.

But today many children are choosing to spend their summers indoors, simply doing more of what they increasingly do year-round: sit at the computer and surf the web or play games. This is rewriting the nature of childhood and the rules of parenting, as a recent National Public Radio story points out.

Gabcast! Club MediaNote #61




***MEDIA SURVEY RESULTS, PART 4-Over the next several weeks, I'll be giving you the results of a mass media survey given to all MC101 students with their final exam during the spring semester. Here is how the spring MC101s answered the following survey question...

What do you see for interactive media (games and virtual worlds) over the next 10 years?
A. It wil be about as big as it is today. (11%)
B. It will be bigger. Large numbers of people will become involved in online games with huge numbers of players. (33%)
C. Growth will come largely through new-generation game devices like the Wii, which allow people to physically act out what their virtual self is doing. (56%)

These MC101s are at the Biltmore Hotel. They are standing in front of a photo of the storied hotel's Opening Night festivities in 1923

A Little Spy in Every Browser

"Behavioral Targeting" is the term for marketers that keep note of the places you have visited online in order to understand your interests and send you ads only for products that you might actually want.

According to those on the cutting edge of online marketing, this trend is good for the consumer because advertising will become more relevant and personalized than ever before. Critics of behavioral targeting see it as a violation of privacy, one that could become quite powerful if online marketers and others begin to swap information or create a centralized database.

Online marketers say the consumer's privacy isn't really violated since they don't collect names and addresses, just data pertaining to online interests. They also see behavioral marketing as having a very big future. One ad exec quoted in a recent Yahoo! News article predicts that we are at the beginning of "a Golden Age of Advertising."

Gabcast! Club MediaNote #60



Here is a delegation of MC101s in the Los Angeles Times' historic Globe Lobby. It was a fine field trip, as always.

***MEDIANOTE MILESTONE This is the 200th post to Club Medianote. Apparently, it is here to stay.