Advanced Storytelling

Any of you other comm geeks going to watch this ? Hell, I'll watch it just for the costumes, but maybe we should start a drinking game--take a shot every time someone mentions Edward Bernays or Ivy Lee? No?

Okay, by now you know the Cluetrain Manifesto: Markets are conversations. Today at work I stumbled across a great definition of marketing, courtesy of Seth Godin: "Marketing is an act that starts a conversation."

I'll admit the new Disney cartoon Ratatouille looked cute, but with the combination of being broke and still feeling well enough to look at food, I figured I'd pass on it for awhile. But according to Eating Liberally , I really should go see this movie. Its message? Yes, even a lowly rodent can learn to cook, but just like the rest of us, his culinary endeavors will succeed or fail depending on the quality and freshness of his ingredients. Am I the only one who finds this message pretty radical for an animated film supposedly aimed at kids? And it seems all the more astonishing when you contrast it to Pixar parent Disney’s Shrek the Third, with its endless tie-ins to processed foods that target toddlers’ taste buds. Apparently the villain in the movie sells junk food. How awesome is that? Now, I'm not naive enough to believe kids are going to trade in their popcorn for carrot sticks at the movie theater, especially after the Associated Press recently reviewed 57 programs a...

First off: It's sad that I get better wireless reception in my backyard than in my apartment, right? Sigh. I normally try to stay out of the quagmire that is the abortion debate, but as usually, elyzabethe wrote something insightful about feminist issues that I had to comment on. Actually, I had to comment on the framing war that was going on in the comments section between elyzabethe and another friend. Then I ended up emailing back and forth with her for awhile. Then someone at work mentioned how the "choice" frame is starting to lose ground, even though advocates don't want to admit it. I started scribbling notes, sighed, and thought, "well, I'm gonna have to blog about this." Elyzabeth rants often against anti-choice organizations and legislation, as is her wont as a libertarian feminist. She’s particularly good at teasing out how anti-choice (A, if you’re reading this, bear with me, I’m referring to ‘anti-choice’ as more than just the abortion issu...

It's 1:30 am, it's Friday night, and for some reason I come home from a party and I get online looking for social marketing sites. Am I in withdrawal from class? Whatever. I've discovered Deborah Schultz , a friend of Hugh's , and she's coined the term I've been looking for in all my digging on transparency , the long tail : "relationship marketing". She also started a del.icio.us account of related links, which I'll have to spend a good many hours exploring. Although her social networking map had one glaring error in that it is missing Facecrack . So on the issue of Web 2.0, I really don't know why I bother writing about it, since the five people reading this blog know more about it than I do. Besides, I need to get back to talking about framing, which is what this blog was supposed to be about. Why yes, I was trying to get as many links as possible into this entry. I think I'm just giddy from having been able to finally hand out some bu...

flashvars="'config="http://www.comedycentral.com/motherload/xml/data_synd.jhtml?vid="87101%26myspace="false'" src="'http://www.comedycentral.com/motherload/syndicated_player/index.jhtml'" quality="'high'" bgcolor="'#006699'" width="'340'" height="'325'" name="'comedy_player'" align="'middle'" allowscriptaccess="'always'" allownetworking="'external'" type="'application/x-shockwave-flash'" pluginspage="'http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer'"> Because that person deserves a pat on the back. Dean nailed his appearance on The Colbert Report last night. Okay, it wasn't Face the Nation, but I would argue that makes it even more impressive--it would have been so easy for Dean to just take the lines Colbert was feeding him, but he actually turned them a...

...since my post last week about the anti-Rove protest on campus. A bit of an identity crisis. Here I am, someone who has had major life-altering experiences (drug-free, thank you) at a May Day protest years ago, putting down activists I agree with. Have I become cold and heartless? Well, no. I realized early on that protests and radical actions were not my thing. But they work for some people, and I was assigned an article for a class that reminded me that even if they don't directly affect change, radical actions do have reasons: Activist organizations use disruptive image events, which are highly charged protests that involve visuals such as people being buried up to their necks in roads and grandparents chaining themselves to trees (DeLuca, 1999). Such events rarely put an immediate stop to the things activist organizations protest; however, according to a Greenpeace campaigner, success is judged by the protestors’ abilities to reduce complex issues to symbols that disrupt pe...