Advertising

Does advertising actually do anything? Everywhere you go, you see logos and slogans surrounding you. Advertisements bring in customers and customers improve your profits but have ads been working recently? The amount of advertisements in a given area have been increasing- increasing clutter. Although I do think advertisements do bring in customers and do make your business more well known, I think all companies struggle in the advertisement department. I am not saying all ads are stupid; I am saying that some companies have an interesting way to promote themeselves. On top of some advertisements lacking their watchers attention, it does not help that TV viewers can scan through commercials any time they have possible. As more and more people are buying Tivo and DirectTV, less ads are actually being watched a lot of money is going down the drain.

Even though I am somewhat skeptical about many advertisements, I am the Advertisement Manager for the school yearbook. I know how difficult it is to communicate with the costumer and shape yourself to their needs. It is not an easy job and it is hard to sell unless someone already knew they wanted before I made contact.

Freakanomics Video

I actually really enjoyed watching Freakanomics because I had never really thought about how a person's name could affect their future. I was so surprised to find out that someone with a so called 'black name' and someone with a 'white name' with the exact same resumes could not get the same jobs. I find it ridiculous. People's characters and work ethics should not be judged based on their names because really, people with a name like 'Temptress' or 'Loser' did not give themselves that name, the name was given to them by their parents.

Freakanomics did not just talk about naming your child. A project was put together with a goal of try and see whether or not students would maintain certain grades if they were paid at the end of each month. Although theses bribes worked for some, some kids grades got worse. Although I think I would take the bribe, I could see how some kids might think schooling is a joke if they are being bribed to do it. I can see how some kids are given the impression that homework is not mandatory if they are being paid to complete it.

Same Song and Dance

One thing I'd like to talk about with regards to this film is "Song." "Song" has to be one of the most ridiculous things I have ever encountered. The way that a company tried to create an advertising campaign, and instead created some kind of bizarre cultural movement that ended up not bringing in customers, but rather raising more questions. The fact that the campaign became so focused on an idea, a way of presenting "Song" so as to lose focus of the actual good itself, the airline. It is no surprise to me at all that Delta got rid of the "Song" division of their company; it became little more than a facade. Some of the people talking about advertising also talked about cults, and how what draws someone to a good is similar to what draws someone to join a cult. Song epitomizes that. People were drawn in by the attitude and the sense of community that Song provided.

The other thing I'd like to talk about is product placement, and how companies are moving away from traditional ads to webisodes, television, movies, etc. I personally hate blatant product placement. On the rare occasion that I do watch a music video it annoys me no end when there is an unnecessary lingering shot on a particular car, or drink, or pair of shoes, or pair of headphones. Yet, I didn't mind the usage of Starbucks in "I Am Sam." "I Am Sam" is easily one of my favorite movies, ever, and yet I am in no way annoyed by Starbucks' presence in the movie. It was not outrageous, it was not annoying, it was subtle, and, as the people in the movie said, Starbucks was kind of like a hero. Who hates heroes? Advertising doesn't have to be annoying, and outrageous, as with product placement and bad movies written around cars, they can be skillful in their utilization. They can work.

Superbowl Ads

Watching The Persuaders in class today made me think about the upcoming Superbowl ads.  This year's ads cost on average $3.5 million for every 30 seconds!

Here is one of my favorites from Superbowl XLIV.  Enjoy!

Incentives vs. Scare Tactics

Something incredibly ironic happened to me last night. While having a conversation with my father he informed me he was switching our insurance to another company, and that he was willing to make me an offer. The new insurance company was willing to strike $400 a year off of our insurance if I was able to maintain a “B” average in college, and that I would receive half of this should I be able to meet the requirements. Essentially, after watching the Freakonomics piece regarding offering children incentives to do well in school, I too was offered an incentive. I found the entire situation incredibly ironic, but accepted anyway. The thing is, even after this is offered, however, I don’t feel any differently or more motivated about doing substantially well in school. That is when my father joked about adding a second part to the deal, which was that should I not be able to acquire this discount, I would have to repay the $400 that I would save. Though I know he was only kidding, I immediately felt more terrified and motivated to do well in school through the usage of a fear tactic rather than an incentive. What I understood from this was that incentives and scare tactics cannot be used separately, but can be used together effectively. The whole point of an exercise such as this is to create a spark of motivation that will get a person to do what is asked of them, and through the letdown of the experiment by the University of Chicago as seen in the movie in addition to my own experience, I now see that.

The importance of names

While watching the movie "Freakonomics", the section about the wide range of baby names between races, social groups, and religions was the most interesting to me. However I disagree with the narrators that a baby's name is not highly important in the later success or failure of that child. I agree that there is a correlation between a child's future and their upbringing, but a child's name is their identity and a label to how they will be seen in society. In earlier centuries, names were chosen because of ancestors or people from the Bible or other religious texts. Today, celebrities are naming their kids after months, fruit, and colors; musicians change their names to something more prominent, and there is a large stigma with black names in our society. Names like Helen, Joseph, Laura, and Matt, are replaced by Hunter, Paige, and Kylie, or unique spellings of names such as Aimee and Rhys. During the one scene in the strip club, one of the dancers was telling the audience not to name their children Barbie or Candy because they were bound to grow up and become "entertainers". I found a website that stated that a British study of 3,000 parents released in May suggested "one-in-five parents regret the name they chose for a child, many of whom were distressed over the unusual or oddly spelled names they'd chosen." The baby naming phenomenon has become so large that people work as professional "baby namers". Names are extremely important to a child's future because our culture is biased on what we see and hear. A name could make or break a job, or cause someone to live in glory or shame.

Incentives and Senioritis

The movie suggested that human nature is to work for the sake of earning incentives.  The movie introduced the idea of paying 9th graders for getting good grades as a for of incentives for hard work.  The incentive of money, however, seemed to be fairly ineffective for one student even if it worked for another.  Although one kid really liked the idea of winning, getting driven home in a limousine, etc. the other did not find the incentive to be enough to work towards the goal.  Its possible that for him the goal was too high, as he appeared to be fully intent of waiting until he got kicked out of school to join the army.  It seems to me that the reward should have applied to someone raising their grade in general, not for hitting a predetermined benchmark.  Furthermore, I do not think that the incentive of money was enough for all of the students.  Like the failing student said, he wanted to be the class clown and be social in high school.  A better incentive would have been if his friends thought better of him for doing well in school, or if he had to achieve a certain level of grades to hang out with them as often.  In this specific scenario, I think that we would have to examine the work and rewards of each individual student in order to get the best result, which suggests that this type of work falls to the parents, not the school.

When incentives back fire/What incentive is

The most interesting topic of the film has to be the study of trying to improves students' grades by bribing them. At first, the skater boy and the African American boy both showed a lot of interest and both found the reward attractive. The African American boy, especially, showed great interest not only in the money but the limousine, which is not an actual financial material gain but a gain in status. They both set out to do it and try to earn it. This is exactly like when we were when we first came to the world. But just like what happens in the normal situations, some people make it, some people don't. While some gain from the program, getting the taste of being success and material gain, others who are not doing as well and see everyone else are pocketing $50 and going to ride a limo, it is very frustrating and then the incentive will become destructive. As we can see the skater boy's grade just drop to the ground after his fail attempts. He obviously got discouraged. This makes me realize that incentives really is the need of triumph over our peers. We always compares ourselves to our peers, if we are in someway better than others, we will feel good about selves. Money, limo merely offers us the mean to do it, for example, being able to purchase better clothing, improving living standards. But if one fail in a program that offers money, money won't be attractive anymore for he/she has fail to be better than the peers. A insult. This make me realize money isn't the incentive itself, and incentive is something non-materialistic, even though material can make it happen.

Bribing sorta works..

I think it was a very interesting experiment they had, the school and kids they choose were ideal. The argument could be made, however, that they choose the wrong kids because their environment promoted failure, but this was the perfect situation. It would provide the most accurate measure of how much an insensitive such as money effects the human work ethic. From what i saw an incentive can only do so much though, if a person just doesn't want to work or sees something else as more important it won't work. The kids who were border line, "D's" but were still trying benefited. Those who were in the "E" range and just didn't even try didn't benefit because the incentive wasn't great enough, i feel if there was a substantial amount more incentive( maybe 1 mil ) then there could have been different results. The experiment as a whole those does show that incentive plays a role in how hard people are will to work for a goal.

name brands??

After watching the movie I thought about what my name means to others. To the people that know me personally or just happen to be an acquaintance. There’s the idea of living up to ones name but again I find that to be absurd. So many people with the same name and yet some will go further than others. I completely agree that success does not have to do with the name itself, but mainly with the area one grows up in, to a certain point. It was interesting to see how names do affect whether one will be hired or stereotyped. I understand that my name does sound Mexican. The Cervantes gives it away, but it does not define the work that I am capable of doing. It just happens to be part of my culture, such as African Americans and their unique sounding names. The idea of what names represent would be that they are like names of certain brands just like what the video talked about. It would be harder to sell one self if it does not appeal to the market!  

Response to Freakonomics

The movie "Freakonomics" I found to be interesting on a number of levels. They were able to bring economics down to a level that a normal person would understand, and made comparisons that were both shocking and fascinating. One segment that I found fascinating was the section about Sumo wrestling and their comparison to how Wallstreet and the banks work. Normally, one wouldn't think that they'd be so similar, but they are. They are both gilded, appear to be perfect on the outside, but have their holes and secrets. Thousands of people are in the corrupt system of Wall Street, and without it would be worthless. Both systems are in escapable, and for the elite minority must exist in order to profit off of it. Also, although most people now know about the corruption of Wall Street and a few know about the corruption of Sumo wrestling, not much can be done about it. The people in charge are willing to silence whoever they must to keep the system as rigged as it is. People call what Wall Street has become "capitalism", but capitalism in itself is not bad. It's part of what our country was founded on. However, everything has a light and dark side to it, as does capitalism, and the corruption is simply a part of it. Hopefully someday things will get better, but I doubt that corruption can ever be completely erased.

In Response To Freakonomics

Now, naturally, I understand that we have not finished the movie yet, but it is my understanding that this blog post is in response to what we have viewed thus far in class, not the entire movie. What I would like to talk about is the opening of the movie, wherein the viewer is first introduced to the idea that to everything there is a hidden side. The example of real estate is used to illustrate the incentives of the real estate agent to prove that in all truth, the home owner wishing to sell and the real estate agent do not have the same goal. While it was a good example because it was simple and straightforward, and allowed the viewer to immerse themselves in the subject without becoming overwhelmed. I do think that it is an oversimplification, and is not sufficiently surprising for an apparently expositional movie. It turns out that real estate agents are not as caring of what price the home owner gets for a house as the home owner him or herself. Surprise, surprise. If the movie had started with something more surprising and less obvious, it would have been a better start to the movie. Not all movies require surprise in the opening to hook a viewer, but a movie that is supposed to be eye-opening should open the viewers' eyes immediately.

Alanna's post about Freakonomics

I know we haven’t finished freakonomics yet, but I know what I want to talk about already… A few of you are aware of the Inquiry, Purpose, and Global Citizenship class available to seniors, and I am a member of that class (I swear this relates). The part of the movie I have found incredibly interesting thus far is when they talked about the declining crime rates due to the legalization of abortion in the late 70’s. One of the reasons I found this so interesting is that in the Inquiry, Purpose, and Global Citizenship class we are currently discussing the upcoming elections and politics in general, this has led to several discussions of a woman’s right to choose. There are candidates running for presidency who believe abortion should be illegal, I believe that a woman has the right to choose, and it’s great to see that there is data that exists to back this point of view. Also I now understand what Mr. Curren meant when he said these were adult concepts, and I am really enjoying the stories that this movie has thus far presented. The study about how your name relates to how your life will turn out was interesting, because they found that your culture/environment plays into your name more than anything and that is also an indicator of how your life could potentially turn out. Overall this is a very insightful film, and because of that I am excited to now read the book.

Is Senior-itis due to a lack of incentives?

One of the first topics we will study this semester is the power of incentives.

Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt state in their famous book - and movie - called Freakonomics that incentives drive everything we do. We'll watch their film during the second week of class and learn that sometimes determining the root cause of human behavior is trickier than we think. Pay particular attention to the segment "Can you bribe a ninth grader to succeed?" 

One of the challenges I face every year is teaching second term seniors. It's not easy keeping the attention of young people who have already determined what college they will attend in the fall. My task as a teacher is to provide incentives that still work on someone who can see the light at the end of the high school tunnel.

As a second term senior, what, if any, incentives exist for you? Are you just putting in your time or do you still feel as committed to your schoolwork as you did during your junior year?