This year’s slate of Super Bowl ads indicate two trends: 1) a continued lack of imagination among the highest paid “creatives” in the world, and 2) a backlash against environmental activism. These Super Bowl ads were decidedly conservative by recycling standard demographic tropes to shore up the shrinking ego of the persecuted male species. [...]
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You can thank PT Barnum (quoted in the header) for viral video’s secret formula: videotape some kind of stupid human/animal trick (the more extreme the better) and draw a crowd. Enter Plane Stupid, a group that wants to reduce air travel by using freaky video to draw awareness to its cause. Problem is, the the [...] (watch the videos in order) Do you want to frak this car? One of the key themes of Carolyn Merchant’s The Death of Nature is the loss of a cultural restraining ethic in our dominant global paradigm, one that limits “progress” and prohibits the over-exploitation of land. Up to the Renaissance it was commonly held in European [...] In the digital media class I teach we have been talking about the “consumer sublime,” which is the idea that people seek increasingly more stimulating media to “awe” their senses in the same way we once encountered the sublime within nature. The clearest example is comparing the experience of going into the Grand Canyon versus [...] Preparedness Now, created by the USGS Multi-Hazards Demonstration Project, is an interesting piece of environmental media. It tries to convey the catastrophic consequences of a major earthquake while keeping some distance through a youthful graphic style so as to avoid being too visceral, and therefore too scary to deal with. Before watching it I expected [...] © Gleison Miranda/FUNAI As a cultural meme, photos of the so-called “lost” tribe of the Amazon circulated more rapidly in the mediasphere than electrons buzzing through duel processors. But now that the images have been revealed to be a “hoax,” we should kick back in our collective armchairs and probe what happened. To be clear, the [...] Yet another chapter in which a major corporation postitions itself as the savior of culture against the oppressor. As I wrote previously about Snicker and its clever Webisodes that somehow tried to convince kids that Mars Inc. is the savior of hip hop and youth culture, another caffeinated sugar pusher, Mountain Dew, has created this [...] Samsung is trying to get on the iPhone bandwagon with its F480 or “Tocco”(“touch” in Italian). Hey, why not just call it the “Taco”? It’s something you eat with your hands… Anyhow, as I argue in my book, one of the greatest distresses of media users is a lack of a sense of place. [...] I’m trying to change my thinking about advertising to become more open to the possibility that there may be something redeeming about marketing. But then I come across another Hummer ad which convinces me that advertising can also be so utterly evil. This is typical of Hummer, and I think a good example of the [...] Image source Image by Giuseppe Arcimboldo As a media lit guy I think the one thing I can contribute to Earth Day is a warning that as companies “go green,” to be watchful of the kinds of images they use to hide or mask other activities. In particular an ad from a newspaper Website by Areva (a French nuclear power company) [...] The “real” McCandless OK, so this is really not a spontaneous deconstruction of Super Bowl ads, but really a clever Miller Lite ad made to look like something fo’ real. I spotted the ad technique right away from the gratuitous lingering shots on the Miller Lite logo, and I thought the cuts were a little too fast for [...] Continuing the thought from my previous post on oppositional defiant disorder, I came across this excellent new series of pharma ad deconstructions from Consumer Reports, AdWatch (What no embed? Come on guys, get on with the Web 2.0! At least put the videos up on YouTube to spread your meme). Just more evidence that [...] | View | Upload your own Charles Baudelairer’s character of the flaneur has been celebrated and vastly discussed as the archetype of Modern Media Man: he grazes the sights and sounds of the new urbanity, a casual consumer of the senses. He is somewhat disengaged, his focus meanders and samples. As a “Bourgeois dilettante,” he’s a no where man. While the [...] So you want to be a media pundit? I’ll confess my dirty little secret: I get a lot of the material for this blog from spying on the cool hunters. There are a variety of lists and Websites out there designed for marketers. These are created by so-called trend spotters, so I rely on them [...] “Who wants a world in which the guarantee that we shall not die of starvation entails the risk of dying of boredom?” I have a new article up at Reality Sandwich: The Transported Man: Phantasmagoria, Tesla and Magic. |
Bridging media literacy with ecoliteracy, this blog features various meditations and musings by Antonio Lopez, an old school dharma punk and media educator. He is the author of:
Mediacology
Now available, Antonio's health and media literacy CDROM curriculum for youth of color, Merchants of Culture. This valuable resource contains dozens of video and print examples of how advertisers market harmful substances such as alcohol and tobacco to various niche audiences, including Native Americans, Latinos, African Americans, Asians, GLBT and Women. This is an excellent primer for introducing the subject of cultural marketing to high school and middle school students. This is also a great product for health professionals and councilors working in the area of prevention. 
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Creative Commons License 3.0 2010 Antonio Lopez - Some Rights Reserved |
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