Learning Process

Getting back all the responses from interviews now, results show that product placement does not appear to play a role in impacting the interviewee’s lives; the amount of time they spend on the computer and internet browsing overshadows both television viewing and watching movies, yet more than 60% of the surveys returned can recall brands from shows they have watched, so is it an unconscious understanding that the brands have already infiltrated their minds? Or is it as Martin Lindstrom describes smokers' choices when undertaking his survey (Lindstrom, 2009, p.15)

It wasn't that our volunteers felt ashamed about what smoking was doing to their bodies; they felt guilty that the labels' stimulated their brains' craving areas. It was just that their conscious mind couldn't tell the difference.

Gathering main discoveries from each week’s progress report:

• Brands need to know their audience before selecting airtime in the case of product placement; consumers themselves must also play a part, as they need to know or have minimal knowledge of products available in the market first. For children, brands have to understand both the children (their main audience), and their parents (the power of purchase). More than 75% of the UK audience were not aware of the meaning of the ‘P’ marque; the notice for product placement that is shown before programmes that have endorsed brands embedded in them.
• If campaigns are strong enough to create an impact in one’s long-term memory, the idea of the campaign will eventually become a brand. From this, it can be said that anything can be considered as a brand nowadays; products, companies, people, even metaphors and gestures. Gestures such as the ‘thumbs up’, ‘thumbs down’, ‘OK’, the Crucifix and their behaviours as a result of the usage are well-known internationally, can we therefore brand with gestures due to the known significance of them?

• As a follow up from the discussion with Eugenie in the last tutorial, can negative branding therefore be made positive by increasing the seductiveness of them? The seductiveness of eating healthily and living well, can it be made better?

• How do children, whose minds are developing, differentiate between positive and negatives before knowing the difference between right and wrong? We implant ideas into our minds with the increasing types of media that we are exposed to – books, newspapers, television, movies. These types of media are created through someone’s ideas brought to life visually or in literary senses. In both cases, both ideas are implanted into people’s minds by adding visuals effects, and in literary ways, the extensive use of descriptive words.

• Product placement, very much like advertising, is an adult invention, perhaps something which may be too advanced for children. As a result, a new materialistic culture has been produced as a result of the adult concept of product placement and advertising; the increase in commercialisation of childhood has dynamically changed the development of children.

• The notions of childhood have very much changed since the days of fairytales and fables, where it was the platform for understanding moral values and notions; the modern rendition of fairytales takes place in forms of magical worlds (i.e. Harry Potter series, or Ben 10 etc.) where there is a merging between the fantastical and of the real, but more dangerously, these are not ideals of teaching moral values and notions, but rather a franchise to increase commodity. This shows the major extent of how brands have infiltrated our minds without much control and from the brands' point of view, it is about providing the children values of a different kind.

• So has brands, become the modern adulthood to the modern childhood? As substantiated from previous research, parents have decreasing importance in guiding children's development; from Nicholas Ind's Living The Brand (2004, p.32-3) He explains the notion of modern-day society using the Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs:

we work because we have basic needs of safety and security...there is a real fear of not being able to afford the necessities of life...Maslow, with his belief in humanistic psychology, recognized that, although people do have basic needs, they also have social needs, and needs for esteem and self-actualization...they do want to be recognized by others for their worth and they do want a sense of fulfilment.

• Our generation is a generation that is the advertised, as well as the advertiser. Branding has become the dictator to children, to childhood.

I have begun to realise that the points I have made not only emphasises on the modern ideals of children is to become older than they are; to be seen to be older and more mature than their peers  – brands exploit this notion to implant themselves into the unconscious and morph social norms.
In product placement's case, where it can be defined into several stages, or phases of embedding into children’s minds in a sentient manner to become part of the children themselves. As a result, the connection between the child and the consequence of their perception of the world from an overexposure of brands has been initiated.

The adult’s dream of childhood can be traced in the history of the fairy tale.  For the most part, we assume fairy tales are stories for children that perhaps we engage in as adults only as a form of nostalgia. We understand the fairy tale as a staple of the child’s world, a world of fantasy left behind with the maturity that comes with adulthood; fables provide a more realistic point of view by providing a moral of the story, which would make it more apt if I were to concentrate on just fables, rather than fairytales as well.

How can I present this concept and push it as the outcome?

From my research and experimentation, what is the problem?
Branding has become such an integral part of society that childhood and their development of values and morals have been jeopardised; childhood has now simply become a period of time where brands exploit by infiltrating their developing values, rendering their lifestyle increasingly materialistic.
The social implications of such an impact would mean that this Generation X, or more recently called the Generation M^2 (meaning MultiMedia) would be working to live in order to satisfy their materialistic desires; as morals and spiritual values become decadent. The loss of innocence, along with the childhood, tender mothering and care that is supposed to accompany innocence by parents has been gradually handed over quietly to the technological gadgets and their branded siblings. Children growing up too fast these days prefer to spend time with their gadgets than their parents, who on average spend only 82 minutes with their children each day.

How has branding therefore, impacted childhood?

The main issue that I discovered that has been hounding the ideology of childhood is that the modern-day child is becoming increasingly obsessive about consumption, this can be interpreted in different ways; whether in food or other products, we are becoming increasingly materialistic in our values, and the age of desiring and obtaining materialistic luxuries are getting younger. Why? Advertising.  The stressful lifestyle that the majority face in this metropolis are beginning to show strains and their children are also noticing too; reports show that parents spend on average only 82 minutes of their day with their child. Where has the time normally spent with children gone? Adults begin to go through the routine of wake up, eat sleep and work, and less time is being spent with children; bills to pay, mouths to feed. The sense of stability of a secure job with secure pay, as compared to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, combining this with the strategic methods of advertising and the overload of information everywhere, there seems to nowhere to hide, and children are being brought up in an environment where advertising is the norm that one probably gets exposed to more than their homework or more time spent with advertising than their own parents. 
   

How am I going to solve it or raise questions that may help deal with the problem?

I initially proposed a visual journey of the gradual overtaking of brands within our sights, using fairytales as the starting point, where morals and values are taught through storytelling, much like brands. Using snapshots from fairytales, a vernacular of childhood innocence, with a twist into their context with brands can aid in raising awareness of the impact of brands have in our lives and the gradual loss of innocence that childhood as a concept was supposed to attach to. By placing brands in such a  context, it shows that brands have embedded themselves into everyday language, enough to create stories out of them.

It is creating visuals that help raise awareness of the increasing amount of advertising, hence dealing with the problem from the roots, rather than providing a solution itself. A solution cannot be created in the scale that is required of the vast industry.

The feedback from the seminar held today (15/9) was not particularly sound; the ideas presented on negativity were given the most praise, but the outcome proposed did not support the rest of the research involved. It has been advised to focus on one societal aspect and focus the rest of the development, although the focus has been based on the collision between the increasing development of materialistic values over the spiritual from the beginning…

In retrospect, since the research that I have been conducting all along has been about materialism, it is therefore only justifiable that I can brand materialism as a concept – the justification of creating such a brand would be to increase the awareness of brand terrorism that faces us everyday, to the point where we are not allowed to choose a branded product over another due to the monopolies that particular company has purchased, and we, ourselves, become the advertiser; a walking billboard. It is merely the path of research that I undertook which took me to this point in a different way, but it will also be the research direction which I undertook which should wield interesting results.

The target audience has very much changed from the beginning of the project; instead of focusing on modern-day children, the audience, in itself, has also grown up, and now concentrating on those that do not believe that they have been impacted by brands, as described at the beginning of this report.
    
The main question now is: How does the research there fit into the research question, and produce an outcome showcasing critical reflection on the project?
 

Bibliography
Ind, N. (2004) Living The Brand: How to Transform Every Member of Your Organization into a Brand Champion. Kogan Page: London
Lindstrom, M. (2009) Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy. Random House: London

Visual experiments ad continuum – the majority of the logomarks to which the target audience associated themselves to, as gathered from the Brand Index 2011, were red, continuing from the previous discussion on colour psychology, to further this, the red logos were complimented with yellow, to signify both speed and happiness. When the logomarks were overlaid on top of each other, it simply became a “visual noise”, where little to no information can be interpreted from the result. I then repeated with the characters and mascots of the brands; there used to be more characters, but in recent years, many corporations decided to retire the majority of them, notably Ronald McDonald, one of the most recognised brand mascots of all time, due to their link and the glorification of unhealthy eating and fast food.

This most certainly reflects upon the situation of the modern world of communication, let alone in the land of advertising; ridiculous amounts of noise is generated from the bombardment of constructed media messages telling everyone to do this, do that, eat this, don’t eat that. Where does it stop?

Speaking of the yellow character, or the colour yellow itself, I read a very interesting article regarding the semiotics of The Simpsons, and how the messages behind the animation itself does not challenge the audience that watch the animation to be able to read the sign behind the animation itself; the purpose of entertainment, particularly for this show, “does not require viewers to have background knowledge of the culture, nor does it require them to really think while watching the show…” (Fakhoury, N et al.)
   
Spent an interesting day exploring the concrete jungle with a visual communication graduate, now flight attendant. His mix of knowledge of travelling to different places, soaking in many diverse cultures, combined with his knowledge of visual communication had meant that he provided some great insight onto the placement and interaction of an idea. One interesting insight he provided was a window; it acts as a barrier between the interaction of the view between the viewer and the outside. When one sits from a different position, for example, below the window ledge, the interaction between the viewer and the view is obstructed by the window’s bars, whereas, if you sit up close to the window, the interaction is more complete, and you become more in sync with your surroundings and the nature; when people look at properties they look for ones with large windows. This was an interesting insight because I started to ponder whether this concept can be applied to television screens and the media being displayed.
   
We also visited WHAT_architecture, who had previously completed a project with a school in North London involving LEGO bricks; the exterior of the school was created with LEGO walls, decorated and built by students, parents and architects in a collaborative project. The semiotics of this type of product placement revolves around using LEGO signifying nostalgia for the adults, and as its tagline suggests, “serious play” for the child; the children that aid in the construction of the school, to them, it is creativity and a chance to add a piece of themselves, to become part of the school as a contribution. For the adults, it retains an infatuation of childhood that altogether contributes towards a positive brand image for both old and young audiences.
   
This is where it brings me to gather all my previous weeks of progress reports and consider what the final outcome of this project shall be, and the intention of the project; the two main questions that I have been asking throughout are:
   

• Can positive brand images be implanted into children through product placement?
• What are the impact of brands on childhood?

   
The second question can effectively be answered visually by one of my original ideas from reading Elizabeth Tucker’s Dramatization of Children’s Narratives, and where ideas derive from. I’ve been interested in the idea of fairytales and how it provides a platform for children’s narratives for awhile. So it is more than likely that it’ll be related to such; a brand can present itself with an emotional attachment for the child in the form of a character to build the initial relationship between the audience and the brand. It can be placed from the perspective if I was to say that the signifier became the television screen, children who become raised in a room with a television may develop unrealistic emotional relationships with the bombardment of stories, through television shows. All media messages are constructed with the aid of language, as Alfred North Whitehead once said "Language foists on us exact concepts as though they represented the immediate deliverance of experience." (Whitehead as cited by Chandler, 2000)

Bibliography
Chandler, D. (2000) [Online] Biases of the Ear and Eye. Available at: <http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/litoral/litoral4.html> (accessed 2 September 2011)
Michaels, S. (2011) [Online] A Conversation With JR, Intrepid French Street Artist. The Atlantic. Available at: <http://www.theatlantic.com/life/archive/2011/09/a-conversation-with-jr-intrepid-french-street-artist/244518/> (Accessed 6 September 2011)
Lyons, J.; Fakhoury, N.; Hsieh, T. and Jahazi, H. [no date] [Online] Reading Television?: The Simpsons. Available at: <http://www.yorku.ca/mlc/4318/projects/simp.html>(Accessed 5 September 2011)
http://www.prweek.com/go/kidsbrandindex/ (Accessed 28 August 2011)

ad continuum So does product placement become the modern adulthood to the modern childhood?
     
Wording for the keywords have been changed to gain a better understanding with fewer (or more) words:
   
Product placement is a form of advertising that embeds brands into forms of media; it implants ideas that provides an emotional platform between the brand and the consumer.
   
Branding targets the psychosocial implications, expressive, terminal，as well as social values, in order to create the ultimate brand loyalty between itself and the consumer.
   
Childhood is a period where cognitive, physical, social and emotional capacities are being developed, and product placement have increasingly exploited such to deliver brands and manipulate their perceptions.
   
Branding is a multi-faceted aspect within the world of design, and from the experimentation and research that I’ve been conducting in the recent weeks, it is about an implementation of an idea, particularly within the world of product placement. I can now relate my current progress back to my original research question: “Whether product placement can have a positive brand exposure towards children”, but rather, to put it simply, it is questioning “whether product placement can implement a positive idea towards children”
This opportunity has opened my eyes to experience unique perspectives on the city; the small moments we don't always pay too much attention to in the chaos that is the bombardment of brands.
   
When I was calculating the brand index scores of the brands that children aged 8-12 (this phase is also known as ‘tweens’) from data that I had gathered, I found some surprising results; even though we live in an increasingly digital world, where more things are done on the internet, from the findings from the brand index scores, tweens are actually the most influenced by sweets and chocolate, followed by electronic gadgets, rather than websites, or TV shows. From this piece of discovery, however, it has to be considered where the source of influence, as well as the content of the influence.

From the brand index data, I started compiling the colour wheel of brands that my target audience associate themselves with, I have realised that more and more are red, or yellow mostly; the colour psychologies of yellow and red combines the attention seeking energy of red with the happiness and optimistic yellow; McDonald’s is the perfect example that combines these two colours – the promise of a ‘good time’, with the excitement and movement and palpitations that it induces by attractive their customers with their insignia is surely a win. A more recent gradual decline of the use of red favour of adopting a more natural tone to their overall tone probably inclines with the quiet background murmurs of ethics within the fast food industry.
   
Whilst compiling the colour wheel, there were moments where I had to pause and reconsider which part of the colour spectrum the logo itself belonged to, as the colour of some brands, where their packaging colour is intact throughout their range, was also considered.
   
I finally began some primary research onto my surroundings; finding product placements, implanting of ideas that encompassed me left, right and centre.  Watching media that was perhaps, a little too naïve for yours truly, but the more I look into this subject, the more I become hooked into it, it is almost like as if all of these brands have amassed into a giant narrative within play, and has become a dictation towards me rather than an influence. This reminded me of a conversation that I had with an Accountant-cum-Politics-graduate, whom had a anecdote to share:

I was watching television with my cousin once, and the age difference is rather large – 10 years apart, so naturally, and watching his, his type of programmes on television…God, I couldn’t even handle the break in between the shows; the products that are associated with the cartoon is played to entice the viewer. Jeez, that gave me a headache.

What she said reminded me of Steve Jobs's saying (Mitchell, 2011)

"When you’re young, you look at television and think - There’s a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that’s not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That’s a far more depressing thought."

— Steve Jobs

Our generation is a generation that is the advertised, as well as the advertiser; branding has become the dictator to children, to childhood.

Bibliography

http://blog.sirmitchell.com/

This week, I managed to also get in touch with members of mumsnet, the online community for parents, by parents; Sharna Jackson of Tate Kids, as well as some raw data on the public’s acknowledgement of product placement from OFCOM, all of which will add great data towards my research. The main problem that I have been experiencing with this subject is that, due to the nature of this subject, and the fact that this is still relatively new, it is hard to gather raw data to create visualisations to show the flow of process.
   
Definitions of the three main keywords/phrases so far as gathered from my research:
   
Product placement is about implanting an idea of purchasing purposes within media; a communication tool that is integrated into the media
Branding is about providing the terminal values for the consumer to build the ultimate brand loyalty relationship between themselves and the brand
Childhood is a period their mentalities are still in development, and therefore should be a period where any form of communication exposed to them should allow to continue to grow; the idea of childhood nowadays is more about consumption and consumerism rather than a process of developing their own identities; their own brand.
   
Carrying on from the previous week on fairytales and fables; the main objective of these stories was to provide a sense of morals for the reader, and to allow them to develop a sense of morals on their own accord. Fairytales and fables are not much different from branding, where both stem from the idea of storytelling, and to create a relationship between the narrative and the reader themselves; to create an emotional link, and to allow the children to relate themselves to the appropriate characters.
   
We, as designers/creative thinkers/design philosophers/all of the above, have objectives, one of those perhaps, is to improve society with future changing concepts, wanting to add some meaning to the society. These life-changing decisions? They are adult concepts. They were influenced by what we were exposed to ourselves, or other ideas. So can it be said that ideas are also adult concepts? If so, how about starting from where we began ourselves? Childhood. 
   
As previously said, childhood nowadays has become a term that is associated with materialistic values, where children grow up surrounded by brands, and are branded themselves, this categorising by sub-culture creates an tidal wave effect of wanting to seek out the latest gadgetry to fit within their evocative values that the children themselves want to see themselves become associated with.
   
By influencing perceptions from a young age, we can change the future from the beginning.  An idea of influencing perceptions is where this final major project was stemmed from; the recent lift of the product placement ban to its essentials, is about the placement of ideas or a concept. On the discovery that children are becoming increasingly obsessive about consumption, this can be interpreted in different ways; whether in food or other products, we are becoming increasingly materialistic in our values, and the age of desiring and obtaining materialistic luxuries are getting younger. Why? One thing is clear; advertising. 
   
Advertising’s role in brands are important in their own right, as advertising becomes the first point of contact in establishing a link between the consumer and the brand itself. How about the products that are targeted towards children? The juxtaposition of promoting a product for children with an advertising campaign that is an adult concept, what effect would this have on children psychologically?
   
The stressful lifestyle that the majority face in this metropolis are beginning to show strains and their children are also noticing too, as the gradual increase of both parents having a full-time job, the amount of time that can be devoted to their children has decreased significantly; “working mothers in Britain spend just 81 minutes each day looking after their children – including mealtimes.” (Donnelly, 2011)
The parents’ role to their children are supposed to be setting an example on growing up and providing a positive mental attitude towards their developing, but as adults begin to go through the routine of wake up, eat sleep and work, and less time is being spent with children; bills to pay, mouths to feed, their children will also begin to be exposed to the routine of becoming slaves to the clock.

Upon reading more on the origins of fairytales, and its psychologies, it provided the most wonderful insight that very much links my research on how ideas and implanted in the first place, with the impacts and function of branding. This is a crucial turning point within the project, as this is about gaining an understanding of the metaphors that became idealised, or branded, and its utilisation of them in today’s society within many contexts.

Combining this with the strategic methods of advertising, particularly, product placement and the overload of information everywhere; on billboards, television, on the internet, that even we, ourselves, as young adults, are being influenced, sometimes unconsciously in light of product placement, where this project began. There seems to be nowhere to hide, and we are being brought up in an environment where advertising is the norm that one probably gets exposed to more than their homework or more time spent with advertising than their own parents; branding is no longer child's play, but  rather, a materialistic maturity for the growing youth in the way that this can be classified coined as a brand terrorism; where brands bombard so much that they dictate our own lifestyle and we inherently lose our freedom of choice.
   
So has branding become the modern adulthood to the modern childhood?

   
Bibliography
Donnelly, L. (2011) Working mothers send 81 minutes a day looking after their children The Guardian [ONLINE] Available at: <http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/8408503/Working-mothers-spend-81-minut...> [Accessed 22 August, 2011]

Interview questions have been sent to designers and professors, one of whom has replied with a little feedback on the questions -  current insight on the questions sent are that there are good questions, but some others are perhaps too general for him to answer them succinctly in words. So before next week, the questions can be looked at again and filter them down to keywords to construct questions that will offer succinct and precise answers which will help towards visually developing on the project. The skype interview is very much looked forward to, as it would be better for the interviewee to express themselves verbally, nevertheless, we are due for a skype interview next week.

For the past 2 weeks, I have gathered newspapers to demonstrate media’s emphasis on negativity rather than the positive to round up the questioning of experiences brands can offer from both negative and positive experiences; out of the articles from Evening Standard that were collected, 4 out of 5 articles on average of each spread emphasised on negativity, based on the rhetoric and the content of the article. What does this mean for us readers? Do we succumb to the fearful society that media and police sirens (that are, coincidentally, passing by right now) that it is a ‘big, bad world’ out there?

In light of the London riots, the media has provided us, the audience, with footage and news coverage that looters during the London Riots were as young as 10, whom were also being arrested. This sparked the debate on how the development of children today were being affected as a result of different aspects of society. But for the sake of my project, I am focussing on the impact of children’s development through advertising, media and communications.

What about children? The majority of children do not read newspapers; that, too, is a rather adult concept of being able to keep in touch with the world’s current affairs. How do children grow into us, young adults, adults etc. whilst developing negativity in their mental capacity during development?

There was an excellent snippet on BBC Radio 4 (2011) which the presenter commented on that

Children are deemed to be innocent and asexual, but the necessity to conform to the society, and also research into contemporary childhood shows the move towards a sexualised society…Online space, virtual space has now become a social, and also, sexual space for children.

Returning to the main design problem of product placement; it was lifted earlier this year in February, albeit children’s programmes are still restricted with such placement. This is a loophole within product placements’ legislation as children’s viewing choices are not limited to just children’s channels unless their parents impose strict rules in their households. Can brands therefore take hold of children’s values before their basic morals and etiquette is fully developed?

Both analytical and propositional visual research are being implemented as a response to the research progress; I have begun to re-evaluate the design objectives for this final major project; and the few questions which I had began asking are as follows:

• Can people improve lifestyles with the aid of branding?
• Can negative and positive experiences for children be branded?
• How were the ideas implanted into a child's mind in the first place?
• Can positive aspects help children improve by making them attractive?
• Can I brand the ideals of childhood?

Morals have typically been more obvious in children's literature, sometimes even being introduced with the phrase: "The moral of the story is …". Such explicit techniques have grown increasingly out of fashion in modern storytelling, and are now usually only included for ironic purposes. [wikipedia]

I became particularly intrigued by the last question which had come up throughout my research, media’s heavy influence on childhood has caused children to become increasingly materialistic in terms of their values, valuing brands and luxury goods over basic morals and ethics that are normally taught from fables and fairytales, such as not judging a book by its cover, or rather aptly, vices are their own punishment; the notions of childhood have very much changed since the days of fairytales and fables.

Bibliography
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral

Midnight News. (2011). BBC Radio 4. Sunday 14th August