For Super Bowl Ads, It’s Go Viral or Go Home - cnbc.com

"We are seeing more teasers because they have been effective," said Steve Posavac, professor of marketing at Vanderbilt University. "This year, many advertisers feel that if they don't release a teaser, they will fail to gain consumers' mindshare, and that their ads will be lost in the clutter."

http://www.cnbc.com/id/100410648

All Viewers Pay to Keep TV Sports Fans Happy - NYTimes.com

"Sports are the television industry's bulwark against rapid technological change: while the companies fear cord-cutting by customers who can cobble together a diet of TV on the Internet, they rest a little easier knowing that former customers would be hard-pressed to find their favorite teams live online."
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/26/business/media/all-viewers-pay-to-keep-tv-sports-fans-happy.html?smid=pl-share

Dodgers, Signing Lucrative TV Deal, Plan to Start Regional Sports Network - NYTimes.com

"The multibillion-dollar deal with the Dodgers seemingly flies in the face of Time Warner Cable's public statements about tamping down on the rising costs of programming. SportsNet LA is likely to amount to $4 to $5 a month per subscriber in southern California, and some of that cost will be passed on subscribers through their monthly cable bills, with Time Warner Cable also absorbing some of the cost."

http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/28/dodgers-signing-lucrative-tv-deal-plan-to-start-regional-sports-network/

Who are behind Super PACs? A collaborative class wiki project

(Originally published 11/7/12)

This week my Media History and Institutions class completed a collaborative research project that worked out pretty well. Each student was asked to research one of the largest individual donors to this election cycle's four largest Super PACs, and to report their findings on a collaborative class wiki. Students gathered information about that donor from ProPublica's PAC Track tool, Bloomberg Businessweek's company look-up tool, reputable citations at the bottom of their donor's Wikipedia article, and the power and influence mapping website, Muckety.com. The information they were asked to gather included: the donor's giving levels to Super PACs, their economic/political/ideological motivations, and their connections to other wealthy people and powerful groups. They completed the project in conjunction with a reading on the history of "dark money" in politics and political advertising.

Here are the directions for the project and the collaborative class wiki where students reported their findings. Feel free to borrow what you'd like.

Up with Chris Hayes: Media monopolies thrive as local newspapers fold

(Originally published 10/6/12)

Here is a great three-segment discussion from Up with Chris Hayes about newspapers monopolies and the often powerful corporate interests behind them. Hayes' guest is Harper’s Magazine's David Sirota who recently published two articles on the topic -- “The Citizen Kane era returns” & “The only game in town.”

For media studies instructors, the video could pair well with news media concentration readings, such as Bagdikian’s The New Media Monopoly, Jhally’s The Political Economy of Culture (p. 45 here), Chapter 1 in McChesney’s Political Economy of Media, or C. Edwin Baker’s Media Concentration and Democracy. Could be an especially nice jumping-off point for discussing the relationships between structural trends (e.g., concentration) and instrumental control (e.g., “consciousness industry”).

SEGMENT 1 

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In Media Res looking for curators to critique Olympics media

(Originally published 6/12/12)

In anticipation of the 2012 London Olympic Games, the media and textual criticism site, In Media Res recently listed "The Olympics" among its current calls for curators. This "theme week" of curated Olympics videos/slideshows and critical responses will be published on July 30-June 3.

The call asks for brief proposals (due June 18) that:

. . . address a wide variety of topics relating to the Olympics and its media representations. Topics relevant to the event may include but are not limited to: branding of/at the Olympics; nationalism and spectacle; narrativization of competitors’ or nations’ participation; issues of gender, race, class, or sexuality; globalization and viewership; and/or representations of the Olympics beyond the athletic games.

Americans' hugely distorted wealth perceptions

(Originally published 5/31/12)

Image: ocregister.com

On the David Pakman Show yesterday, David and friends talked about a 2011 study by Michael I. Norton (Harvard) and Dan Ariely (Duke) titled "Building a Better America−−One Wealth Quintile at a Time." I'd read about this study a few months back. The study highlights the wide disparity between (a) how "regular Americans" think the distribution of wealth in the U.S. breaks down, (b) what their ideal distribution would be, and (c) what the actual distribution of wealth really is. As Norton and Ariely explain, they:

ask[ed] a nationally representative online panel to estimate the current distribution of wealth in the United States and to ‘‘build a better America’’ by constructing distributions with their ideal level of inequality. First, respondents dramatically underestimated the current level of wealth inequality. Second, respondents constructed ideal wealth distributions that were far more equitable than even their erroneously low estimates of the actual distribution. Most important from a policy perspective, we observed a surprising level of consensus: All demographic groups—even those not usually associated with wealth redistribution such as Republicans and the wealthy—desired a more equal distribution of wealth than the status quo.