Modern Media for WEGO

There are so few places for advertisers to go these days to amplify the strength of their message.  There are so many subgroups and interests that atomize our interests as adults.  Yet there is one place where the archetypes remain more unifying, the mediated images of our childhood. 

Business

Web Playgrounds of the Very Young

By BROOKS BARNES

Published: December 31, 2007

Forget Second Life. The real virtual world gold rush centers on the grammar-school set.

Business / Media & Advertising

Economists Say Movie Violence Might Temper the Real Thing

By PETER S. GOODMAN

Published: January 7, 2008

A new study challenges conventional wisdom, suggesting that violent films prevent violent crime by attracting and keeping would-be assailants occupied.

 A recent Virginia focus group test-marketed language to get tougher on Iran. UPDATED.

Meet Noel Gugliemi.  Actor of over 66 films, he has found an obvious typecast.  No doubt he has talents as an actor, but we simply need to look at this in the context of the overall representation of Latinos in media.  According to U.S. Census data, persons of a Hispanic or Latino orgin are 14.4% of U.S. population.  A comparison to study by the Chicano Studies Research Center of UCLA, 4 percent of Latinos have regularly appearing roles on television.

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Thank You, Chuck Norris

By Julie Bosman

Just when Mike Huckabee was starting to be taken seriously, he brought back Chuck Norris.

Mr. Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas who, according to polls, last week ascended to the number-two spot in Iowa, will begin running his first television ad there today ­– starring Mr. Norris, the tough-guy action hero who has been actively campaigning for Mr. Huckabee.

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Fishnets and All, Bratz Image Gets a Hollywood Polish

By BROOKS BARNES

Published: July 16, 2007

Negative public perception has prevented Bratz, the overtly sexy dolls, from blossoming into a full-scale entertainment phenomenon. But that may change.

Maybe you have seen the Dramatic Chipmunk on several viral clips or even mentioned on tv shows.  Youtube has it viewed over 14 million times! But what is most interesting is the intertextual morphing of this viral clip and several other pop culture works.  While the dramatic chipmunk is quite a laugh, once the dust settles we can see that the phenomenon of its parodies serves as a simple reminder how the internet may be the most important catalyst for the advancement for human creativity, even if it is just chipmunks/ prairie dogs. 

This is not hyperbolic if we break down the evolution of this clip. 

1. Original Footage of a chipmunk.[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/SZjPvoYeZRI" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

2. Next generation - dramatic music is added. [kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/a1Y73sPHKxw" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

3. Enhanced clip posted on youtube or other video social netowrking sites

4.  Other users download clip 

5.  Clip is combined with other "texts" from other successful pop culture films.

SAW [kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/Nso2iFMg_sM" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]KILL BILL [kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/54vtXRI32MQ" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]James Bond [kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/2Uaw2CdjU3c" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

So what?  Yes this is a low brow cultural product perhaps one step up from flatulence but it demonstrates the interconnectivity of creativity now available through this technology.  Instead of chipmunks posing as James Bond, what other collective creative endeavors have emerged?  No doubt Post Secret is one of the many examples to be at the start of what could be an incredible renaissance of collective art on a new medium.

Photoshopping Mag Covers: How Much is Too Much?
Thursday, October 04, 2007
By Dylan Stableford

Glamour: We Didn’t Slim America

For its October issue—the “First Annual Figure Flattery” issue—Glamour put America Ferrera, star of ABC’s Ugly Betty, on its cover. For Jezebel, Gawker Media’s “girlie blog,” it was bit too much “figure flattery.” The site ran a post under the headline “Photoshop of Horrors” juxtaposing Glamour’s cover with a photo of Ferrera at the Emmy Awards the same week the magazine hit newsstands. (The apparent slimming recalled a similar incident in which CBS’s in-house magazine trimmed Katie Couric by about three sizes.)

A Glamour spokesperson denies any such trimming. “America was shot for the cover in June, and as she says in the article, she’s a size 6/8.  There was no slimming done to the cover.”

Photoshop manipulation on magazine covers is nothing new. George Karabotsos, design director at Men’s Health, points to a 1952 National Geographic cover that moved the Pyramids closer together. But recently the practice has teetered into dangerous territory, with Glamour’s Ferrera and Men’s Fitness’ blatant enlargement of Andy Roddick’s biceps—which Roddick himself exposed as fake on his blog (“little did I know I have 22 inch guns and a disappearing birth mark on my right arm … whoever did this has mad skills”) and led to the resignation of the magazine’s designer—as the most egregious examples.

Roddick isn’t the only victim to cry foul. Kate Winslet, after seeing herself on the cover of a British GQ: “I don’t look like that, nor do I desire to look like that.”

Sometimes it’s not the body that is manipulated. In May, In Touch touched up Angelina Jolie’s veiny arm for its cover. Editor Richard Spencer was unapologetic: “You’re right, we softened those veins. The arm was very, very veiny … I think they can forgive it for the cover — unless it is a story specifically about their body. This was about her plans to expand her family.”

But what about making your cover photo fit the story? In June, Star magazine used a photo of Jennifer Aniston carrying what appeared to be a manuscript for a cover story on the actress’ alleged “$5 Million Tell-All!” One problem: the manuscript was actually an art catalog.

Indeed, cover manipulation has become so widespread, says Karabotsos, that some magazines even include a budget line for retouching.
How Much is Too Much?
“Retouching should be like wearing light makeup, not to the point where you can’t recognize the girl anymore,” says Self art director Petra Kobayashi. “We retouch to make the models look bigger, healthier.”

Karabotsos agrees. “We look for the ideal celeb or model for our magazine—a regular guy to have a beer with. He can’t be too perfect, too retouched,” says Karabotsos. “A reader could think, ‘If the cover’s not real, maybe the info in the magazine isn’t that real.”

But even transparency doesn’t translate to trust, Karabotsos says. “We go to magazines to bring us the world. They’re bringing us a modified world that doesn’t exist? Can we trust them?”
“You have to think,” adds Kobayashi, “Where does reality start?”

Bratz vs. Barbie BY Abby West

How had I let this happen? It was Christmas 2005 and my then five-year-old daughter had unwrapped yet another Bratz doll, adding it to the pile of scantily clad playthings that well-meaning family and friends had given her. HuffIt

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Just the year before, Barbie had ruled the over-commercialized day. But now my little fashionista (with her three or four voluntary outfit changes a day) only had eyes for Bratz. And not only does that continue to this day, but she’s also hardly alone: The Bratz are the No. 2 doll in the country (second to you-know-who) and are clearly winning the buzz war, with their very own live-action theatrical release now playing. When’s the last time you caught the blond, leggy one at the multiplex? I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I wish she’d come out of the Dream House and make a comeback already — at least with all those different versions of her (remember Astronaut Barbie? Teacher Barbie?), she showed a little aspiration beyond just looking good in a sparkly dress or leather pants.



All of which begs a lot of questions: What is with these incredibly popular little dolls who just so happen to embody that Britney-esque spirit now imploding in a gossip magazine near you? Are they worth worrying over? Could they be destroying the next generation of females with their future-Maxim-cover-girl look? And most of all, how did they manage to turn Barbie into a good girl, a near feminist icon even, in comparison?



For a while there I’d managed to mostly ignore the Bratz, with their absurdly big eyes on their absurdly big heads. They were undeniably cool, this multicultural array of dolls dressed to the nines in funky clothes that would have made any club girl proud. I reasoned that they were meant for older girls who were more likely to dress that way — not my little one. What I forgot was that while little girls adore their mothers, there comes a time when they really want to be like older girls. In this case, older girls as embodied by these dolls — never mind that they look like little hookers. 



“They don’t look trashy to me. I think trashy is in the eyes of the adults,” said Isaac Larian, CEO of Bratz’s maker, Micro Games of America, on Nightline earlier this month. Then there must be something wrong with a whole lot of us because we all see dolls that look, for lack of a better word, a little slutty. And I know I sound like I’m 1,000-years-old when I say things like that, but as a mother who’s pushing 35, the line between prude and rational is getting thinner.



Now don’t get me wrong. Through the years I had my own issues with blond Barbie, with her unattainable proportions and a gazillion accessories, from her vapid representation of all things fake to the impossible expectations of female beauty that she helped institute. But when it came down to it, I knew her well. I have fond memories of my own collection as a four-year-old in Trinidad, and years later, playing with them in my Bronx apartment. I’m sure the attention and exaltation I gave her contributed to my self-esteem issues as a little black girl who would never have hair like that unless I sewed it on. I had a few of the parade of black Barbies that came on the market, but even as little kids we knew that they weren’t “the real thing” and that white Barbie was the one we had to have.



So there is a part of me that wants to accept the multi-culti groove that the Bratz have going on. I should be embracing Sasha with her brown skin, even though her hair is just as impeccably straight and long as the rest of them. I should love the “exotic” looking Yasmin and friends. But something in me resists. Maybe it’s that I think they’ve set feminism back 20 years with things like their TV show and video game, in which they run a teen magazine with money they pick up from the ground or make from photographing each other. Despite the fact that they parrot all manner of girl-power phrases along the way, they are still espousing a kind of emptiness that is particularly dangerous coming from relatable-seeming dolls. Or maybe it’s just the queasy feeling I get when I look at the Bratz baby dolls who are inexplicably dressed in baby tees or bikini tops with their diapered bottoms. Even at her most Malibu, Barbie wasn’t nearly as sexualized as these dolls are, with their overly made-up faces.



Or maybe it’s because I see my almost seven-year-old daughter pulling her cute little-girl dresses and shirts tight in the back, trying to create a waistline while she juts out her hip and strikes a pose, and I realize that no matter how much I keep her away from sexual content on TV and in movies, I can’t take it out of her world completely.



The knockdown, drag-out fight between the makers of the two dolls will continue, both in toy stores and in the courtroom. Mattel says the Bratz designer came up with the concept while he worked at Mattel, and the makers of Bratz and the makers of Bratz, MGA Entertainment, say that Mattel’s My Scene Barbie is a rip-off of the Bratz. As if that very girly fight wasn’t embarrassing enough, MGA also alleged that Mattel tried to corner the market on doll hair. 

But in my daughter’s eyes, the war is pretty much won. “Face it, Mommy. Bratz are just cooler,” she told me recently, and I missed Barbie, in all her blond glory, a little more.

Originally posted on SirensMag.com.

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