Smart People

Everything seems to be falling into place in my life. My grades are above average, despite advertising being a difficult course. Oddly enough, even though I’ve only been away from home for a couple months, I can already tell how being in this program is changing my life.

                                                  (none of you are as dumb as this girl)

Anytime I talk to someone in my class, we always get on the topic of our course, and advertising in general. That’s not the part that changed, however; it was the way that we talked about our classes. In high school, all you heard was “oh my God! This class is so stupid, why do we even have to take this”, but in college when we talk we actually reflect on the things that we lean in class.

We exchange ideas and we tell each other about ads we like. For the first time in my life I can have (or at least think I’m having) intelligent conversations with people. We are all striving to reach a goal and we all need each other to get there. To be honest, I’m just happy that it’s the smart people I get to talk to.

 See yeah next time

What About Us College Kids?!

As most of you know from reading my previous blogs, I am an advertising student. My brain is slowly being trained to pick apart media and to decipher meaning out of every advertisement I see. Being in residence, and also broke, I don’t get to watch television nearly as often as I normally would if I was at home.

Not being able to watch TV has definitely shown me how much more of an effect that it has as an advertising medium. I have spent far less money on anything that I would have bought after seeing it on TV than I have… probably my whole life. It might have something to do with me having no cash, but that’s not the point

Even now, as I sit in the TV lounge for probably the third time since I moved to residence, watching Country Music Television, to try and find inspiration on advertising that appears, and all it seems that country music has time for showing is sad songs, sung by pretty girls with sad boys sitting in the corner drinking out of a bottle of Jack Daniels.

When the commercials actually do come on, however, they show commercials about this wholesome lifestyle, filled with teaching children to do hard work by buying them Tonka construction toys, and cleaning detergent that takes out the dirtiest stains for people who do all this hard work.

I just want you to see how versatile television may really be. Though I think that there is a market that is not being advertised to though that people should really start planning for which is the college kid demographic. We don’t have the money for any damn TV, so why isn’t there more poster advertising or online advertising geared towards people in my age group? Just something to think about.

See ya next week.

Greater Being Bless PETA

PETA stands for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, and they do just that. They focus on the wellbeing of all the animals that the rest of society does not respect. Not only are they a huge representation of the potential strength of the human race, they also have some of the most pointless, random and awesome advertisements which they have become synonymous for.

http://www.theage.com.au/news/people/annalise-strips-to-stop-cruelty/2006/03/08/1141701564148.html

I thought to myself upon… ahem… further research into these advertisements, why would they do that? It seems so irrelevant as to the message they are trying to convey. Then all my questions were answered; I came across this handy little page on the PETA website (www.peta.org). Here it tell of how they use it as purely a means of grabbing publicity so that they pay not a thing for advertising because the media does it all for them.

http://verybadfrog.com/24194/photo-stories/pirate-ship-bedroom/attachment/pirateship-bedroom-12

They are an organization unlike their competition because they do not have the high industry budget for their advertising ventures, therefore using these risqué is a sure fire way for PETA to gain media coverage, if not only internet on websites that people my age often happen to find ourselves on once in a while.

http://my.spill.com/photo/eva-mendes-fur-id-rather-go

In my opinion this is the smartest thing that an organization could have done with the means in which they had to do it. As per everyone else, I don’t care what you think, as long as someone thinks these girls are good looking.

See ya next week.

The Lazy Generation

I don’t think that there is any more loosely defined a generation than Generation X. This, as I understand it, is people who were born after the baby boomers of post WWII, at the end of the cold war, which would have made them between 1965 and 1980.

The reason, I believe (this is an opinion, should you have come here for solid facts, you know where the exit is) is because of the independence of these people in gen x. They are defined as the “latchkey kids”. This means that the kids would leave for school (or any other time consuming event) and when they come home the parents are at work still.

This leaves the kids unsupervised and alone. This causes for intense dependence on individuality so that they can take care of themselves, not just when it is they are at home, but because they develop those skills and put them into practise in their everyday lives.

This individuality is what came to develop the main cultural perspective on the whole world. Generation x has also been reflected on as the “lazy” generation; with no one to tell these kids that they needed to be active, they became lazy.

Though, being alone allowed for lots of these kids to come out of their shells and develop the music out of the 80’s. Music which has become an audible illustration for the time. Bands like Michael Jackson, Duran Duran, Prince and Madonna.

Not only pop culture greatly influenced generation x, it was also the rock and metal music. Iron Maiden, Metallica, Def Lepard… You get the idea.

Well hopefully this can give me some insight as to what I should write about for my research paper for media and culture. I picked it thinking I knew exactly what generation x was and that’s when I realized how loosely defined it was or how many layers there was to the whole thing.

See ya next week.