Advertising Research

I Found some more research on YouTube...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LuBn5EyFiKs

•Conservative Party using YouTube as an outlet for finding support.

•Through YouTube you can get this video to the masses quite easily, has had 1401 views so far. •People can respond and talk about the issues the videos raise, get... their opinion across etc. Also, I was looking at the commercial/advertising side of YouTube, not sure if this really ties into our topic as a whole but thought I would mention it anyway...

•Businesses also using YouTube as source for advertising.

•When you type “commercial” into the search bar you get 998,000 hits, and when you type “advert” you get 115,000.

•First video that comes up under “advert” is “The Cog – Honda Advert”.

• Long advert (2.00mins) 388,298 hits so far. Much too long to put on TV, would cost way too much, but on YouTube it’s totally free so they can put their full adverts on there, and if it’s interesting enough people will watch it and spread the word that it’s good. Usually when broadcasting, advertisers only get around 30 seconds for an advert. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGngcQb_0qg

The 9 JUGS facebook group we set up..

Meeting 3

Wednesday 21st October

After our last meeting, we all went away to carry out research individually. In order to organise our thoughts we split the topic into three headings:

· What needs to be tackled?
· Why does it need to be tackled?
· How should it be studied?

This way, we could break YouTube down into its main components, such as: video content, business/marketing influences, and the fact that it is used for social communication. So by understanding why YouTube was constructed and how it’s used, we can understand why it’s so popular.

With this in mind, we decided to research YouTube communication in finer detail, because this is a key mode of modern media. Despite the cultural significance of YouTube, we have found that it isn’t properly addressed in Media Studies. Therefore we explored ways in which YouTube affects the political economy, and why this is a relevant topic to study (i.e. Gordon Brown’s campaign via the YouTube to reach a younger audience).

In today’s session we combined all of our research, condensed it, and began to sketch the layout of the presentation. We decided we will produce approximately six pages, and began to bullet-point our main ideas.


Left: planning the slides for our presentation


We started to think of ways to improve our presentation with empirical research, so we planned a survey. By collecting the results from 18 – 21 year olds, we can evaluate how dominant YouTube is within youth internet culture.
We decided that in our next meeting we will bring a laptop and begin our powerpoint presentation ..............

Research - Studying YouTube

Above: 9JUGS (L-R Jack, Bekah, Jamie, Kim, Katie, Nikki, Francesca, Amber and Claire) meeting in the Bute Building to discuss our research and ideas

This week Nikki and I have been investigating the extent to which YouTube has previously been studied by academics. We were quite surprised by the number of journal articles that we found about YouTube, as there were more than we had expected. The aspects of YouTube that had been written about by academics included the role of YouTube in coverage of the Iraq war, and use of the website by politicians in order to reach a young audience. However, when we looked at examples of Media Studies textbooks used by students, we found that the
research that had been carried out into Youtube had not really been brought into the classroom. Even the most recent Media textbooks featured very little discussion of Youtube, and several members of our study group who had studied Media at A Level or GCSE noted that YouTube had not been part of their syllabus. We felt that perhaps this was because YouTube's cultural importance and role in today's changing media landscape continues to be overlooked by many; it is not seen as a particularly worthy or valid subject for academic study. Our group disagrees with this, and we would argue that such a huge cultural phenomenon as Youtube shouldn't be ignored by media scholars or those who teach young people about the media.

Interestingly, we discovered that a course in YouTube Studies got underway in 2007 at Pitzer College in the US:
http://www.pitzer.edu/news_center/in_the_news/07-08-academic_year/2007_09-04_highered_youtube.asp
We think it would be great if more schools and universities considered running modules such as this, which take Youtube seriously and encourage students to look at the site, its limitations and its significance from a critical and academic point of view.

Study Group Meetings and Research on Celebrity Culture

Following the meeting last week, we all split into smaller groups to research our chosen subject and devise a blog. Katie and I researched the way in which YouTube has influenced celebrity culture, so we began by creating a mind-map some of the people who have become famous through YouTube. Firstly we researched Chris Crocker because we knew that his infamous video 'Leave Britney Alone' has been seen all over the world and has 27,433,046 views up to date. As a result, he’s had countless promotional opportunities such as appearing on the hit American TV show 'Maury', and having his own CD produced. However, on the negative side, he has received numerous death threats and countless sacks of hate mail. It seems that these kinds of social networking sites can be dangerous to the public, and it’s very easy to bully and discriminate on these sites as well. We then went on to research the way in which celebrities use YouTube to communicate with fans or promote new albums. We came across Chris Brown's public apology to his fans for his recent court case following a domestic altercation against Rihanna. This highlights the importance of YouTube as means of communication in modern culture, and even Hollywood A-listers have recognised the social significance of the site.

In today’s meeting we all discussed our findings and attempted to link our research back to the brief. After noticing that some of our research fields were too broad, we decided that we need to be more specific in terms of how YouTube should be taught in the classroom. After further deliberation we chose to explore the way in which YouTube is used as a form of communication, and why it is an important media outlet to study. To conclude the meeting we all agreed to go and research this in more detail.

By Amber Dite and Katie Dowling

Meeting 2

Weds 7th October

WHO WAS THERE: Rebekah Edwards, Claire Durkan, Amber Dite, Francessca Farmer, Kimberley Dunn, Katie Dowling, Nikki Driscoll- Davies, Jamie Evans, Jack Feeney

We returned the next day with our ideas for our specific topic. We spent the majority of the meeting looking at Youtube in more detail and significant features and important information about it. We created a brainstorm to share our ideas and came up with a list of areas we wanted to look at in more detail:
* Music videos
* Censorship
* Rudetube
* Famous people that have come out of youtube
* Happy slapping/ bullying online
* Downloading from youtube
* Film trailers
* Companies that create official channels on youtube
* Making and posting your own videos
* Youtube as a news form/ news video clips
* Phone links with youtube.
* Ways youtube could be studied in media studies
* Our experiment to see what videos get more or less amount of hits

At this point in time, we did not feel we could be productive any further as we did not have access to a computer or any other areas of researching. Therefore, we decided to go away and research the different areas mentioned above . We split into pairs and set each pair different areas to research and bring back information to the next meeting...

The first meeting...

Tuesday 6th October

WHO WAS THERE: Rebekah Edwards, Claire Durkan, Amber Dite, Francessca Farmer, Kimberley Dunn, Katie Dowling, Nikki Driscoll- Davies, Jamie Evans, Jack Feeney

It took us a while to find a time that EVERYONE could actually make, being busy people with busy schedules. Finally, we agreed to meet twice a week, every Weds at 3pm and then once more when everybody was available. We also set up a facebook group so that we were able to contact each other to discuss ideas throughout the week and to make everything easier.

At our first meeting we started off by trying to find a name for the blog, after some discussion we decided on 9 JUGS (Journalism Undergraduates)- not that exciting! We talked about things that we thought would be useful on the blog, such as photos or video clips of meetings(all of which should be on here soon!)

We then looked at the actual the question itself: “BBC 4 has approached a number of Universities to ask them to provide information about a documentary they are making called ‘Taking Media Studies Seriously’. They want to know which areas of the media haven’t really been explored, what needs to be tackled next in media studies, and how it should be studied.”

We all agreed that we didn’t really understand what the question was asking. We weren’t sure if it meant tackling areas of the media in general or just the media studies subject. As we were unsure, we decided to first look at areas of the media in general, and hoped that we would be able to talk to a tutor to help us gain a better understanding.

We started by brainstorming different areas of the media. We first discussed ideas for areas of the media that had already been studied in great detail. We came up with television and film, advertising and print journalism. Looking through a recently published Media studies textbook we noticed that these areas were already written about and studied in great detail. Taking this into consideration, we decided started to discuss areas of the media that were not so commonly studied. Some of us having studied media studies at A-Level noticed that areas such as reality TV, celebrity culture and music piracy were not studied in a great detail if at all.

It was interesting to try and work out why there has not be much exposure to these areas in Media studies seeing as though they are quite commonly used and accessible in today’s society. When researching, we found an interesting blogsite called http://mediastudies2point0.blogspot.com/ that expressed the need for an update in media studies. When looking at this site, the idea of internet technology and in particular the idea of watching television programmes on the internet, was something that stood out to us.

We decided to look at the idea of watching television programmes on the internet in more detail. It came to our attention that this had not been very widely studies in Media studies despite becoming increasingly used worldwide. Claire came up with the very interesting idea of Youtube and the fact that it was such a popular and important part of our media yet it had rarely been studied as an aspect of media in its own right.

We looked through various textbooks and Media Studies help sites online and could not find much about youtube as a media subject. This idea stuck with us and we ended the meeting with an idea of using Youtube as our area we wanted to expolore and finalise for our presentation.