HCRHS Media Lit

"For some 150 million users around the world, Instagram is an indispensable tool for broadcasting the tiny slices of life you deem most sharable, whether it's your cat curling into a fluffball or a pretty plate of Eggs Benedict. A new study, however, claims that signal comes at a price. Researcher Linda Henkel at Fairfield University found that Instagram and similar photo applications may be making it harder for us to, well, remember stuff."

"n a widely-read study, business school students were given a case assignment on Heidi, a real-life successful entrepreneur in Silicon Valley. But there was a catch. Half of the class randomly received their case with one teensy tiny change made: The name "Heidi" was changed to "Howard." Afterward, the students were surveyed, and though Heidi and Howard were found equally competent (as they should have been because they are the same person), the students found Howard much more likeable. The following ad pretty much sums up why."

"Truth has never been an essential ingredient of viral content on the Internet. But in the stepped-up competition for readers, digital news sites are increasingly blurring the line between fact and fiction, and saying that it is all part of doing business in the rough-and-tumble world of online journalism."

"You just can't not click ... right? And millions of other people are clicking, too, making Upworthy one of the most popular sites of 2013 - and allowing its newer imitators to get really popular really fast."

"To celebrate 2013, we invited some YouTubers to star in a mashup of popular moments this year. Can you spot all the references? WATCH THE TOP VIDEOS OF 2013:"

"Have you got the cojones to sing carols in front of tens of thousands? Heineken challenged people to find out, with "Carol Karaoke," a campaign that invited karaoke crooners to a private event, then pulled the rug out from under them by challenging them to continue singing in front of thousands of people. Developed by Wieden & Kennedy New York, Carol Karaoke is a continuation of Heineken's "Open Your World" brand positioning, which the agency has tried to bring to the real world by showing people that life can be more fun when you take the unexpected route. Colin Westcott-Pitt, VP-marketing for Heineken, said that the concept is a "good fit" with the brand, which began as a "small beer brewed in Amsterdam that wanted to open our world.""

" You've seen our picks for the 10 Best Ads of 2013, but can you name all the ads that made it to our shortlist of 48 spots? Check out the compilation here, and see how many you recognize. "

"here's a tool for vetting news and information in the digital age. The "SMELL" test won't make you foolproof, but it can help you become a savvy information detective. Apply it to any content purporting to be factual from any source - face-to-face, to Facebook, to Fox, the New York Times, and online "to infinity and beyond." On some major issues, fact-checking websites will sniff out bias for you, e.g., Factcheck, Politifact, and Snopes. But most of the time, you're on your own."

"They make an emotional promise. They usually have two phrases. They paint their political proposition as obvious, as beyond debate. They're headlines in the Upworthy style, and they seem to have colonized every news source. Upworthy the company has done well by them, too: On Thursday, it announced it had 87 million unique visitors in November. (For context: That's more than the New York Times. A lot more.)"

"Welcome to the brave new world of native advertising, where publishers are trying to come up with twists that go beyond standard ads and that carry the whiff of editorial credibility. For an advertiser like Samsung, the (mostly) positive CNET review is probably worth more than a display ad bought on the site. CNET Replay has enabled Samsung, Intel, Microsoft and Lenovo to promote positive reviews for their products long after they were published."

"The marketing blitz has only intensified since then. A Ben & Jerry's ice cream tie-in. An Anchorman exhibit at Washington, D.C.'s Newseum. Seventy car commercials starring Ron Burgundy. (Chrysler reported record sales after they went viral on YouTube.) An event at Emerson College in Boston naming their communications department after him, if only for a day. A Ron Burgundy "autobiography" - excerpted in The New Yorker. Appearances on ESPN, MTV, even a Canadian curling competition. The scorched-earth media strategy is designed to work in a world of millions of screens, says Ben Carlson of the social-media tracking company Fizziology."

"On Thursday night, as millions tuned in to see Carrie Underwood ambitiously take on the role of Maria von Trapp, croon about the hills being alive, and make children's clothing out of drapes in NBC's The Sound of Music Live, DiGiorno Pizza was also watching-and live-tweeted the whole thing. The Nestlé brand's tweets were funny and hilariously pizza-related"

"Pop Secret and Deutsch Los Angeles have for the last year been coming up with innovative digital ways to change your popcorn-eating experience, via Pop Secret Labs. There was Pop Search, a browser add-on that searched the web to find the best place to watch a movie online; a Rotten Tomatoes partnership to help viewers find like-minded critics; and an app to prevent your popcorn from ever burning again. But this might top them all. Pop Dongle is a mobile phone attachment that emits the sweet-and-salty smell of popcorn as you play the brand's mobile game, Poptopia, available for iPhone and iPod Touch."

"In recent years, the web has exploded with images, blogs and microsites that glorify dangerous weight loss at any cost. Photos of emaciated girls tagged with #thinspiration and #thinspo saturate Twitter feeds and Tumblrs. Waist-down shots picture girls in gym gear that hangs off their shrinking bodies. Pinterest photos depict women with #thighgap; they're so thin that, even with feet together, their thighs don't touch, a genetic impossibility in most, but one that can occur in the dangerously thin. In a sense, the phenomenon is nothing new. Similar photos have been online since the late '90s. But their volume and accessibility is unprecedented. One survey shows that between 2006 and 2008 alone, the number of such sites had increased by 470%. At the same time, dieters are getting younger. According to NEDA, 40-60% of girls aged 6-12 are concerned about their weight or about becoming too fat."

"Native ads are ads that don't look like ads. They blend in with the main content of the site, like a promoted Tweet from Samsung about its new phone, or an article about a miracle weight loss drug on a news site. >This week, on December 4, the Federal Trade Commission is hosting a kind of town-hall meeting about native advertising -- which is starting to look like the goose that lays golden eggs to online advertisers and websites. Advertisers love them because they work, users interact with them more than they ever did with banner ads; sites love them, because they pay; site owners can charge more for these ads than they ever did for banners."

"Based on an article in Marketplace Tech published Dec. 3, it might not be that easy on digital media. The advertising in question, referred to as "native ads" by author Stacey Vanek Smith, are ads that do not look like ads. Because of this, Smith reports the Federal trade Commission will look into their use. The reason: fear people cannot tell the difference and might be misled, misinformed or just plain, as one source said, "hoodwinked.""

"The fact is, there is a very good chance that, last night, Amazon "announced" a service that will never exist in reality. Why did Amazon do that? The answer is free advertising. Even better: free advertising the night before the biggest e-commerce shopping day of the year, Cyber Monday. How much was that free advertising worth? "60 Minutes" gave more than 15 minutes to its Amazon story. A 30-second spot during the 7 p.m. show usually costs just over $100,000. If you figure Amazon got 30 30-second commercials' worth of time, you can estimate that it got about $3 million worth of "earned" media. "

"But it wasn't a fluke. That's the problem. In just the past two weeks, the Internet has been told, by sources they trust (and share on Facebook), that a New Jersey waitress was stiffed on tips by an anti-gay family and that Amazon.com was about to launch product-delivering drones. This was just two months after Jimmy Kimmel created a sort of viral ad for his TV show, a video of a "twerk fail" that was reported by multiple TV news channels as real. Or real enough. Hey, it was a video on the Internet! In all three of these cases, readers were pointed to fake stories that were basically PR for successful businesses or-in the New Jersey case-a scam by a waitress whose collegues considered her an inveterate liar. How many news outlets tried to confirm these stories before running them? You don't want to know."

"When you see photo "proof," ask yourself: what is that a photograph of? Could I reproduce that evidence myself in under 45 seconds using my cell phone camera, a pen, and a coaster? Is that a shot of something on a computer screen, which means almost nothing? Does that look like a piece of "evidence" that would get by a savvy tenth-grade geometry teacher trying to figure out why a kid was late to class? Does the behavior being described sound like the behavior of a human? Are people in the story reacting the way you would expect people in that story to react? Does it appear that everyone in the story has been scripted by a reality television producer?"

"It's been about a month since Instagram users have been subjected to ads in their feeds, and the photogenic world somehow hasn't ended. In fact, the companies behind the ads seem to be reaping some benefit, even if the actual value proposition here is still a bit foggy. Curalate, an outfit working with companies that want to advertise on social media, looked at all five brands included in Instagram's first push. If nothing else, the paid ads were much more effective at attracting likes than the unsponsored posts by the same brands, as the chart below shows:"