favorite blog post...

Over the past 3 quaters I have been blogging about a bunch of different topics. When we started to talk about advertising it really interested me because some family members work in the undustry and I am one of those people that is brain washed by advertising. It is also pretty cool to look into advertising and go behind the scenes. 
So may favorite blog post is Advertising, Advertising, Advertising... which is about advertising today, and hoe big of a role it plays in our society today. Also a possible Junior Theme topic...

Midmajors...

All Basketball fans know what the Big 6 is. It is the Six Major conferences in college basketball (and basically all sports too). The Six Majors are the Big Ten, Big 12, SEC, ACC, Pac-10, and the Big East.  The NCAA Mens Tournament is suppose to consist of the 64 best teams in the country, but it usually consists of all the Conference Winners along with most at-large bids going to the Big 6. This year the sweet sixteen consists of 11 different conferences and 5 teams who are considered mid-majors. The teams are Northern Iowa, Butler, Xavier, Cornell, and St. Mary's (California).
Many ESPN and CBS analysts give these teams the MidMajor label because history doesnt have them as big time teams. Last year the NCAA committee invited only 4 at large midmajor teams. This year the committee doubled that number to 8 and it has paid off with 5 going to the Sweet Sixteen.
If a teen from the Big 6 (power conferences) go a few games above .500 then they will most likely get a invitation to the Big Dance. For the MidMajors they have to win the Conference or get second or third at worst. And they even have a harder time impressing the Committee because they can't schedule great teams, because the power teams are afraid of losing to this "MidMajors" Many dislike the thought of having MidMajor teams that dont have large fan bases make it far in the dance, and others love the fact that their are some amazing upsets throughout March.
Some teams like Xavier who makes the tournament very often along with Butler shouldn't have the "Midmajor" label, but when asked, they don't mind it because they dont wanna be the team that everyone picks, and they want to be under the radar. But some other teams hate the MidMajor label and want people like us to stop using it to describe their players and conferences. They think that it is disrespectful of the league.
What do you think about the MidMajor label and what it brings to the table?

Advertising Slogan Quiz

 Advertising plays a huge role in our lives today. Everywhere we look there are advertisements. No matter what you do you cant avoid them.

Below are Slogans of Companies that are among the most well-known around the world today. 
Can you name the Brand / Company from their Slogan?Note: They Start of Easy (maybe) and get Harder the father you get (maybe). The answers are in the first Comment Below

1. Just Do it.
2.Taste The Rainbow
3. I'm Loving It!
4.That Was Easy
5.Can You Hear me Now? Good.
6.It Gives You Wings
7.Eat Fresh
8. Obey Your Thirst
9. Zoom Zoom
10.Priceless
11.We Try Harder
12.Melts in your Mouth not your hands
13. Impossible is Nothing
14.Possibilities 
15.Double Your Pleasure, Double your Fun
16.The Ultimate Driving Machine
17.Whats in your wallet?
18.Its in the Game
19.Think Outside the Bun
20.Come Hungry. Leave Happy
21. Buy it. Sell it. Love it.
22.Real. American. Jeans.
23.Let Your Fingers do the Walking
24.Stick Together
25. The Every Pain Reliever
26. Quality you can Taste.
27. Life if Full of surprises
28.Betcha Cant eat just one
29. Made from the best stuff on Earth
30.When you care enough to send the very best

If you can get all 30 of these I will be very impresses. Let me know your score, and be honest. If you do get all of them, either you've been taken over by advertising or, you've been taken over by advertising

Advertising, Advertising, Advertising...

On average you will see about 6000 marketing messages, or ads, today alone. That means you will see about 2,190,000 marketing messages a YEAR. Believe it or not your looking at a couple right now. Look away from you're computer screen and you see a couple more, a label on a bottle, logo on your t-shirt, and even a poster on the wall. So if you think advertising and marketing messages are not a huge part of your life, then your wrong and you better re-think that. Just do the math (its right above). Its something that is out of the consumers control.

Why do companies advertise? Companies advertise every possible place, because there are consumers that are looking to buy everywhere. The more and more you see the Nike swoosh and the Just Do It! slogan, the more likely you are to buy a Nike product. When companies advertise it makes us the consumer think about buying a product. Believe it or not, me and you fall under this umbrella too. The way the companies see it is that Out of Sight is Out of Mind if you don't see the ads, your not as likely to buy the specific product. They make accessories seem like necessities.
outsell Inc. recently published a report putting out some numbers. Estimated budget  for advertising and marketing in the USA 2008: $412,400,000,000 (yep, about 412 billion dollar). Thats a lot of money.

Is it really worth it to put forth 412 billion dollars for people to see  2.19 million messages a year?   I dont know, What do you think?

Life without Freezers??

Imagine going to the market every day to get your food for the day. We are just so busy now a days that we couldn't fit it in, so we would starve without them right?
The Freezer and frozen food started to become a huge deal in the late 1920s. General Foods bought Charlie Birdseye's rights and patents in 1929. At the beginning the freezer was a hard thing to sell. This was because no one had ever seen  one before 1929, and know what knew what to do it, and how to prepare food. They began to show "how to" videos and programs to teach people how to use the freezer. The freezer was not something that the average family wouldn't have. Many would say that if they had a freezer that it was a privilege not a necessity.
Advertising had a huge role in the success of the freezer. Without advertising the freezer may not have evolved into what it is today. Now when you walk into someones kitchen you notice the freezer and refriderator right away. This is because of advertising. It played a huge rold in the evolution of the freezer along with many other inventions later to come.
Does advertising play a huge role in the success in the product? Maybe... What do you think?

The Art of the Handshake

The Handshake is usually the first thing you do when you meet someone. No one wants to extend their hand and receive a "dead fish" Thats the worst way to start off the rendezvous with someone.  The most common "shake" is called the original handshake. Once finishing the original handshake, people add modifiers which are like; touching chest’s, snapping fingers, one arm around the back, touching knuckles, rubbing elbows, high fives, shaking each others feet, parking the car, and some more hand gestures.
Here are the Six things you Must do to complete the Original Handshake
1. There should be 2-4 feet of distance between you and the target and all your fingers should be touching each other. Your thumb and index finger should create a 90 degree angle and your hand should be pointed slightly down to the floor.
2. Thisnext part is very key to the handshake and this is the part that many fail to do correctly. The first part of your hand to make contact is the webbing on your thumb, and it should contact the target’s webbing on their thumb.
3. Once you have made first contact, you then should slightly point your hand further twards the ground and wrap your fingers around the target’s palm.
4. Now the Grip: a good handshake grip should apply enough pressure so that someone would have a problem prying your hands apart if they tried.
5. This is when the “shake” in the handshake happens, the shake is the Super Bowl of the handshake so make it a good one. With a stiff wrist, move the target’s hand/ arm  up and down 2 or 3 times, this should last about 3 to 4 seconds.
6. The first time you meet someone you should stick with the Original, no use in trying to add in a modifier if you do not know that person well. Usually modifiers are used amongst friends, once you are amongst one’s friends and have witnessed a modified greeting, you may attempt to reproduce that greeting.
If you do this you will never give or receive a "dead fish"

New Surveillance Cameras

The current surveillance cameras are pretty big and way to easy to spot for criminals. The criminals know the cameras way to well, and now know where their range ends, and they do some damage where the cameras can't see them. But soon all this will come to an end, with the new and improved cameras that are harder to spot with a much wider range.
They expect in 3-5 years that the new wave of cameras will be so small and have such great vision that there will be no way to hide from the police cameras. Someone apposing this plan had this to say, "They use federal money so they've never had to argue for these things in a budget. They've never had to answer the question of whether these things work in reducing crime," Stating that they never really looked into how well the cameras actaully work.  These cameras should and could reduce    crime in the roughest neighborhoods around the Chicago area. They are looking into putting in camreas in more schools, and this small "invisible" cameras in many more public places.
Some think that these cameras will work for a little, but the overall goal wont be reached. What do you think about the new camera purposal?

Womens Basketball in the News????

Over the past week, two of the biggest womens basketball stories got some national press. I am a huge fan of Sports Center, and watch it religiously, and there has never been two important womens basketball stories in the same week.
1. UCONNs womens team breaks their own record of most games won in a row with 71. Im guessing no one even knew that.
2. Baylor's Brittney Griner punched another girl in the face during their game last week. Griner is a 6 foot 8 inch freshmen women, who is basically a man playing in a womens league.

What one of these stories is bigger? You would think the UCONNs womens team with 71 wins, maybe, or Griner who is the greatest womens basketball player basically ever to live.

For the first time that I know of, two womens stories on the same Sports Center, thats unreal.
I think its kind of funny to think that the only time that a womens basketball story is in the news is if records are broken, or the best player does something stupid. In mens sports everygame of the pervious day or week is talked about on the news, but not womens sports.
The Griner punch is something that will be talked about for the rest of the season and the rest of her career. If that happened in a mens game, yes they would be suspended, but it wouldnt be talked about for years to come. When Ron Artest and the Pacers got in a fight with the Pistons, not a lot of people remember that and it was a flat out brawl.
What do you think about the UCONN womens basketball team and Brittney Griner punch?

What light have you Turned on?

Have you seen the lights or have turned on a light? Not your typically 60 or 120 watt bulb, but the light that drives you.
Im guessing the light that you have turned on the Green Light, of course.
After starting to read The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, we have began to talk about the green light. What Drives you? was the main focus of this discussion. I was thinking to myself, what drives me, and it took awhile for me to find what actaully drives me.
My Green Light: My green light is one that is consantly on, not always thinking about the future, but live in the moment. You don't want to miss out on opportunities that may come up because your thinking to far ahead. You have to live in the moment, and expect the unexpected. Many times I get caught up in my day-to-day life and forget about the big picture. And on the other hand i get caught up thinking way to much about my future that I cant enjoy whats in front of me. My green light is to live in the now while still keeping in mind my future.

Whats your Green Light?