HCRHS Media Lit

The relationship between Wonderful Pistachios and Rovio's Angry Birds entered a new level Thursday with the launch of The Hunt for the Golden Pistachio, the first fully branded Angry Birds game.

Video News Releases are short broadcast news reports that appear in some news programs as part of the news, but are really created by sponsors or special interest groups. Click on the links below to read more about each VNR, including the client(s) that funded it, the TV stations that aired it, and the techniques that each station used to incorporate the VNR into its newscast.

The photographs of celebrities and models in fashion advertisements and magazines are routinely buffed with a helping of digital polish. The retouching can be slight - colors brightened, a stray hair put in place, a pimple healed. Or it can be drastic - shedding 10 or 20 pounds, adding a few inches in height and erasing all wrinkles and blemishes, done using Adobe's Photoshop software, the photo retoucher's magic wand. And that is a problem, feminist legislators in France, Britain and Norway say, and they want digitally altered photos to be labeled.  Dr. Farid and Eric Kee, a Ph.D. student in computer science at Dartmouth, are proposing a software tool for measuring how much fashion and beauty photos have been altered, a 1-to-5 scale that distinguishes the infinitesimal from the fantastic. 

The 2008 financial crisis made it clear: Americans save too little, spend too much and borrow excessively, says Princeton professor Sheldon Garon. In Western Europe and East Asia, governments aggressively encourage people to save through special savings institutions and savings campaigns. Garon has just released a new book, Beyond Our Means: Why America Spends While the World Saves. He discussed his findings with NPR:

The wide-ranging inquiry into criminal abuses by the British press has led to testimony about relationships and careers damaged by tabloid excess. Newspapers owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. are at the heart of the scandal. A former features editor for one of those papers stole the show at Tuesday's hearing.

Ken Goldstein, who tracks campaign ads for Kantar Media's Campaign Media Analysis Group, or CMAG, says videos like Romney's have become increasingly popular with candidates for a couple of reasons. "They're a very cheap thing for the campaign to do - sometimes it doesn't really even cost that much money to produce the ad," he says. "And then what they're hoping to do is get a bunch of earned media or free media coverage to amplify that message."

"Through this agreement, Facebook will provide Heineken with a global marketing platform that reaches millions of people as well as access to Facebook's deep expertise in building long-term relationships between brands and their audiences," Heineken said in a statement. "The collaboration also provides Heineken with access to Facebook's latest products."

Video of a police officer dousing Occupy protesters with pepper spray was one of the top three news-related memes of 2011, according to the analysts who follow this sort of thing at Know Your Meme. Also in the group: a photo of President Obama and his top advisers awaiting word of Osama bin Laden's death and the news that Apple Inc. co-founder Steve Jobs had died. They fit perfectly into the somewhat loose definition of a meme. All three started as one thing - in the case of "pepper spray cop" it was video of a University of California, Davis, officer casually walking down a line of seated protesters as he shot the stinging spray into their faces - and became something else entirely as people used digital tools to add their own interpretations and comments.

This year in viral video ads feels a lot like last year - many advertisers chose to evolve successful concepts and characters, such as Old Spice pairing Mustafa with Fabio for an old-fashioned Internet duel, and DC Shoes continuing Ken Block's hugely popular Gymkhana series.

the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), currently making its way through the House of Representatives, and its sister legislation in the Senate, the Protect IP Act (PIPA), which are supposedly intended to combat copyright violations on the Internet. Unfortunately, these bills are written so broadly so as to not only eliminate Internet piracy but replace the innovative and democratic aspects of the Internet with a tangled bureaucratic mess regulated by the government and corporations.While holding companies accountable for their role in copyright infringement is important, this legislation threatens to turn the whole Internet on its head, disrupting innovation in business and technology and muting democratic dialogue, by allowing copyright holders to unilaterally impose sanctions on companies accused of copyright infringement without due process. Based solely on an accusation (not a conviction, mind you) of a copyright violation, the U.S. Attorney General, and sometimes the copyright holding companies themselves, will be able to block access to and business transactions with websites accused of such violations. Financial institutions will be forced to stop transferring legal funds to accused websites, search engines will be forced to block accused websites, and advertisers will be forced to stop placing ads on accused websites. Moreover, the bill is written so broadly as to override the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which allows social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter to operate freely. Unfortunately, under SOPA, if a user on YouTube or Facebook were to mistakenly or unintentionally upload copyrighted material to the sites, those websites could also be shut down

The latest on the OPA bill.

How are people using social media to interact with brands, and how are companies using the power of social media to reach more customers? Who is most receptive to brands on Twitter? How about on Facebook?

Need a bit of inspiration this morning? Check out this video from Erica Gorochow, explaining how the most iconic of brands can be built from the simplest of building blocks.

Some of you were asking about Wikileaks. This story is about the army private who gave the confidential material to Wikileaks and his upcoming trial. When he worked in Iraq, Manning allegedly downloaded thousands of war logs and diplomatic cables and shared them with the website WikiLeaks. He faces 22 criminal charges that could keep him behind bars for life.

Post-production enhancement of beauty advertising has been standard operating procedure from the age of the air brush to the age of Photoshop, but an action seen by some as long overdue from the National Advertising Division of the Council of Better Business Bureaus against Procter & Gamble Co.could change that. The NAD today announced that P&G had discontinued superior-performance claims and a post-production-enhanced photograph in print advertising for its CoverGirl NatureLuxe Mousse Mascara after the industry self-regulatory forum launched an inquiry into the claims and photos.

But the relentless mass marketing of cool has tainted this style of behavior and made it seem inauthentic or contrived to a growing number of individuals. It is almost inconceivable that anything could happen, at this late stage, that would restore to cool the freshness and vitality it possessed in the fifties and sixties. Cool now lacks conviction and energy. Above all, its economic force is diminishing. And this, more than anything, will accelerate its decline. The arbiters of taste - at record labels, in films and TV, in consumer marketing, in media - will respond to these economic shifts rather than lead them. But follow they must, or disappear from the scene. Their successors will not make the same mistakes. Over time, this will transform even the last institutional bastions of cool into promoters of the postcool worldview. One of the most interesting spectacles of postcool society will involve the dominant forces of the old paradigm scrambling to co-opt the new one. Packaged and slick and phony will attempt to become down-home and natural and authentic. We can see this playing out in many arenas - from music to clothing, politics to daily news. But let us take one sector of our economy and show how this works.

Starting March 1, InStyle will take over a 19-by-42-foot storefront at the bustling corner of 57th Street and Fifth Avenue and the windows, enabled with touch-screen technology, will show six spring looks. The venture is overseen by the magazine's publishing side, although the products featured in the window will be inspired by the title's March issue. Collages, in a similar vein to Polyvore's model, can be created and instantly sent as a digital postcard to smartphones. Essentially, these cards provide a detailed shopping list, with special offers and a photo stamp (women can personalize the cards further by having their photos taken at the storefront). Geo-targets from the cards will direct shoppers to a given brand's closest preferred retailer. It can get as specific as, say, "see Linda on the third floor of Bloomingdale's, in the northwest corner of the store."

Below, our take on the top 10 digital trends for 2012 that will go mass.

Facebook plans to migrate its Sponsored Stories ad platform into users' news feeds early next year, the company says. Introduced last January, Sponsored Stories - a new ad format integrating your Facebook friends' activities into small ads - began appearing in the column on the right side of the News Feed. Last month, the ads began appearing in the Ticker as well. Perhaps anticipating criticism for the latest migration of Sponsored Stories, a Facebook rep emphasized that the ads will be used sparingly. Most users, she says, will see the maximum of one ad per day in their News Feeds. The speed at which the ads cycle through the News Feed, meanwhile, will depend on various factors that Facebook hasn't yet determined, a Facebook rep says.