Young people – who have disposable income and a tremendous influence on family purchases – are the perfect target for marketers and advertisers. This section covers various issues related to marketing that targets children and youth.
Marketing & Consumerism
More often than not, we're assigned a gender identity before we're even born, and media provide a lot of the messages we get about that identity. In this section, we unpack some of the media's baggage around gender.
To help kids avoid the many traps and pitfalls set up by online marketers, parents and teachers need to become more informed about online marketing techniques and privacy issues – and then pass the information on to kids.
Surely you've heard of Inspector Spacetime, the cult British TV series that's run (with interruptions) since 1962. It has a tremendously active, engaged fanbase that's created blogs, videos and music devoted to it. Oh, and one more thing -- it never existed. It was made up as a thirty-second gag on the sitcom Community, as a parody-cum-homage of Doctor Who.
This is the second part of a two-part blog. The first part looked at some of the more straightforward ways of making money online such as sales, fee-for-service, subscription and brokerage.
One of the most unusual things about Internet-based businesses is that few of them try very hard to make money. Of course, with a very few exceptions (such as Wikipedia) making money is certainly in the business plan, or there wouldn't be all that venture capital floating around, but in general the approach has been to come up with a good product or service first, and only look for ways to make it profitable after it's acquired a steady clientele. Hugely important and successful ventures like Google, YouTube and Facebook all started out operating at a significant loss. This pattern continues today: it's already hard to imagine the Internet without Twitter, but so far that service isn't earning its makers much money (though you can be sure they're looking for ways to do that.)
Three well-known companies – Xerox, Starbucks, and the Gap – have recently made changes to their most public face, their logos. Each change has met with varying degrees of success, giving media educators an opportunity to look at just what makes a successful logo work.
For parents, this time of year can feel like walking through a minefield, with ads, decorations and music all aimed at getting kids excited about Christmas. Every year children eagerly ask Santa for the “hottest,” “must-have” toys – and then turn that “pester power” on their parents.
Why is a movie about a young boy learning kung fu called The Karate Kid? For most of the film's young audience, Jaden Smith's break-out movie doesn't explain the confusion. Their parents and older siblings, however, may recall the earlier installments in this series which started with a young Ralph Macchio learning karate from Noriyuki “Pat” Morita, a movie which started as the hero's quest to learn karate to overcome his tormentors and evolved by film's end into a coming-of-age story about the bond between mentor and student. The first Karate Kid struck a chord with audiences, becoming the fifth-highest grossing film of 1984.
People who make their living producing images, such as photographers, stylists, publicists, directors and pop idols, learn how to use those signs to convey the impression they want to make. Although teen girls who are trying to send a signal to their circle of friends and pop music producers who are trying to send a signal to an audience of millions are working on different scales, the principle is very much the same. Depending on your audience, you need to tailor the signals you send out very carefully. Even your age can have a certain amount of wiggle room when dressed in the right signs.