Product Placement

Product placement has been around for a long time in novels and movies and more recently in television shows. It happens so often now that it is hardly recognizable.  In movies is where it is most commonly noticed.  Some early examples include the film The Garage (1919) which featured a Red Crown Gasoline sign hanging on the wall. Moving forward a bit, a more obvious example appeared in a Marx brothers film Horse Feathers (1932) when life savers (candy) are thrown off of a boat where a woman is unable to swim.
The practice of product placement became more mainstream in the 80s when Hershey's payed a million dollars to have their product of Reece's Pieces to be in the movie E.T. Another very famous example of product placement that is seen throughout the entire film is in the movie Cast Away (2000) in which Tom Hanks is a FedEx employee who is in a plane wreck which causes him to be stuck on an island and he uses the FedEx packages that are washed ashore to survive. 
There are tons of more examples of product placement in movies and television that are happening in this day and age and they have gotten so good at it that the placement seems natural and you may hardly realize that someone payed to have their product show up in the movie or show.  In the movie The Yesman (2008) I did not realize how much product placement was in the movie until the second time that I watched the movie.  It is quite blatant product placement and there are multiple products that show up during the movie. 

Quiz

A lot of celebrities  and television shows have their own blogs or twitter accounts.  These accounts are very successful, many of my friends that have twitter accounts follow many celebrities or famous people. Samuel L Jackson recently came on to twitter and used a certain work on his first post that he is pretty well known for using. He said "can a Motha F@$%a say motha F@$%a on twitter?",  I do not doubt that this at least has some people talking and had more people adding him. Though twitter or facebook fan pages may not always be the best way to address the public they make it much easier to address your whole fan base with a sincere apology or reasons explaining why you did something. For instance, I am a fan of Boston Celtics player Rajon Rondo and he was playing a game in Louisville that I was going to and he posted two pictures of shoes.  The shoes were both his signature model but they were different colors and he would allow his fans to choose which color shoes it is that he would wear at his game that night.  I helped vote on the pair of shoes that I would like to see him in that night and it payed off! I voted on the lime green colored shoes that he wore that night instead of the other pair that happened to be blue.  Most of the other players wore blue or white shoes but I recognized my favorite NBA player by his lime green shoes which made me feel more like I was closer to the celebrity that I was interacting with. This allowed me to feel more obligated to watch my favorite basketball player which I can imagine that this is the way that it happens with most people that follow their favorite sports stars or celebrities on social networking sites.

Henry Jenkins Speech

There were many interesting things that Henry Jenkins brought up in his speech last Wednesday, Sept.28. Of the many topics that Jenkins' spoke of one of the most prominent throughout the speech and the one that I learned the most from was about gardening. Well in a way it was about gardening, Jenkins said that you cannot just put a couple seeds out and expect those few seeds to turn into large healthy sunflowers.  You have to lay down many seeds all over and then reap the ones that are the biggest and healthiest.
Jenkins is not talking specifically about growing plants but more so about throwing out many ideas for hopes of those ideas becoming bigger, or putting yourself out there to more people so that those relationships get stronger. Which all relates to his newest book, If It Doesn't Spread, It's Dead.

Spreadable media is a concept that Jenkins focused heavily on, which are things like viral videos that are seen by millions of people quickly. Advertisers have been greatly affected by spreadable media because it used to be that the only way that millions of people would see a commercial in a short period of time would be commercial breaks at the super bowl.  If advertisers could figure out the formula for what makes things viral then they could use that to sell products quicker. It is something to think about.