Andover Advertising

It's time for the races: Andover student presidential races.
Walls, windows, magazine stands, everything imaginable, become a giant billboard for dozens of loose colorful paper poster ads lumped around and on top of each other, fluttering with every person's passing and door opening, sporting the smiling faces of candidates and their compadres as you walk by.

They are a spectacular display of creativity, wit, and spectacle. Funny, original, and colorful, these advertising clumps make people stop in groups at their feet to read, or even more so, respond to their bright pictures and bold text.

Advertising in American history evolved from an industry strategizing the promotion of a product, to the promotion a brand, to the promotion of an abstract idea associated with a brand. The American advertising landscape is shaped by combinations of all three: there are the ads which highlight product qualities (cost being one of them), and those that do not even feature the product.

What is the Andover market like?
Essentially, candidates are products being ruthlessly marketed to the hearts and minds of a vote-flaunting consumer. In the first round, 18 potential candidate products compete in the Andover market and the 12 most popular products qualify for the next round of market exposure. All candidates are 11th graders appealing to consumers from all four grades.

The ad campaign trying to sell these candidate products must appeal to the most, the best. What is the Andover's presidential advertising landscape?

All ads are presented on Letter or Tabloid size paper. Some use only text, but most use both text and pictures to varying degrees.

Carl Hardin's white posters blast "Vote for Hardin" in bold black text. This is equivalent to advertisements that say "Buy X", merely revealing the existence of a product.

Some posters advertise product qualities and characteristics. Dan Aronov highlighted a specific campaign platform issue of his in each poster, beside a picture of him doing something about the problem.

Mackay and Jackie Lender advertise themselves as being tied into a bigger idea of popularity, but nonetheless, the product itself is still being marketed, not the idea of a Mackay Presidency.

Other posters market the candidate or their platform as a brand image, tied to a greater idea. Cleveland's poster uses a play-on-words and fantastical picture to brand her campaign as a source of hope and possibility.

Jeremy Hutton aligns defines himself as an on-the-move, pro-active, problem-solving, adventurous candidate in his posters, emphasized by the cheesy idioms/catchphrases and outdoor sports pictures. Everything about Jeremy is branded as active.

The advertising landscape at Andover combine the many strategies of media advertising: spreading awareness about a product, highlighting positive characteristics about a product, tying a product to an idea, and promoting an entire, specific brand image surrounding the candidate and potential presidency. Whether conciously aware or not, Andover students think like marketeers: they understand the different methods of influencing/appealing to consumers and can remarket something normal as extraordinary using those methods.

What could be more important than war?

An Article by the New York Times 'Reporters say networks put wars on backburner' claims that it is harder than ever to get doverage of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars on the air in the United States.

The article claims that "coverage of the war in Iraq has been massively scaled back this year...CBS News no longer stations a single full-time correspondent in Iraq, where some 150,000 United States troops are deployed."

Another article said: In January of 2009, Iraq accounted for only 1.25% of news stories in the US. Partly, news organisations are turning their focus from Iraq to Afghanistan. But even so, Afghanistan currently accounts for just 2% of news coverage. The economic crisis, by contrast, accounted for 47% of coverage two weeks ago, according to the most recent Pew report.

Chief foreign correspondent for CBS discusses American reluctance to hear about our troops and mission overseas.


Several months went by in 2008 without the sound of a bombing echoing through Baghdad. Somehow sadly, this trend, reflective of the decreased violent activity in Iraq, is reducing coverage.

A Pew Center Study showed that "the reduction in violence on the ground that began late last year has coincided with a significant decrease in coverage from the war zone as well." Anita McNaught, a correspondent for the Fox News Channel said “The violence itself is not the story anymore." John Hindertaker, writer of the Power Line blog, winner Time Magazine's Blog of the Year, says:
"One wonders, though, whether the change may be due in part to the fact that network executives are more excited about publicizing apparent failure in Iraq than success there."

The only reporting from Iraq in recent months has been about Iraqi elections and American troop redeployment or restructuring. Breaking news headlines of carbombings and suicide attacks have become a thing of the past.

After a peak of news coverage about the surge, with violence fading and Bush leaving, the interventions have become less important to American politics. New events, such as the fiancial meltdown, reccession, and 2008 presidential campaigns, have become more newsworthy for Americans and have displaced war coverage. In the first three months of 2008, coverage of the presidential campaigns was covered 11 times more on national television than the situations in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Americans now have more "important" things to fill their airtime with.

The blogosphere's response to the New York Times article and phenomenon either laments the tragedy or conspiracy of American media corporations. The tragedy or conspiracy is not that they have failed us, intentionally or not. The tragedy is that they conspire to capture as many restless eyeballs for as long as they can. Issue awareness A.D.D. of the American public means that our mission overseas, if not politically important (like during presidential election years), is boring to us.

Media companies do cater to us viewers, but they do have the power to shape what we become excited about.



http://www.journalism.org/node/10365