Tuesday, April 28, 2009

BeCentsable.net

This morning while I was getting ready for class I was watching the CBS early morning show and they had these two ladies on the show who created this website. They basically said they were tired of paying so much for groceries and decided to change the way they were grocery shopping. After they researched and became expert grocery shoppers basically they created this website that completely focuses on coupons and saving money! They went to a few different stores and at one store the total was about $79 and after all of their coupons the paid $29!! It was so neat because they researched everything you could possibly research about saving money, what coupons stores will take and which products you can use multiple coupons on and possibly get for free because of your combination of coupons.

I found out that when you have a coupon from the newspaper, for example $1 off of Colgate products, and a grocery store is having a sale on Colgate products you can combine the coupons! The only time you can't combine would be like taking two of your Kroger or tom thumb specific coupons and doubling up. I was pretty excited about this website, so I encourage all of you to check out this website, and also coupons.com updates their list of coupons every single day!

http://www.becentsable.net/
http://www.coupons.com/

Here is the video from the CBS Early Morning Show
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/04/28/earlyshow/main4974159.shtml

Until Next Time!

Monday, April 27, 2009

Honeymoon Booked!

I know, I posted twice tonight but I have been meaning to put this up for a few weeks. I have just been so busy with school, my past 3 weeks or so have been jam packed with school, projects (big projects... 26 page paper, 12 pages, and a biology research paper that is very time consuming, and of course finals are about to be here) In addition to school Nate and I have been looking more for houses... no luck though :( In case some of you don't know, we have put an offer on about 4 houses and almost on 3 more but they sold before we got a chance. I will not get discouraged though, it just means there is a specific AND wonderful house that is supposed to be ours!!!

Anyways, as some of you know because of the timing of the wedding, we are not able to go on the honeymoon we had planned on. Carroll's football stuff moved up to the week after our wedding and so we have to make it a 3 day weekend instead of going to Eldorado Royale in Mexico. But it is ok because we are going to have a blast anyways and we will get to go on a trip 6 month or a year down the road.

We are going to stay in Dallas at the W-Victory Hotel http://www.starwoodhotels.com/whotels/property/overview/index.html?propertyID=1521

We are staying in The "Cool Corner Room" -weird names for all the rooms. But it is windows from floor to ceiling and we are on a corner, hence the name. Our view will be downtown Dallas!
I am excited, it is a neat hotel and we plan on laying out at their pool (on the 16th floor!) and relaxing for a few days.

Take a look at the pictures on the website, it is a really nice hotel!

Thursday, April 23, 2009

Advertising to Children

I recently had to write a paper for my media law and ethics class. We had to choose a topic that in our opinion was an ethical issue in the media. I chose advertising and targeting children in the media. I am posting this because the information I found was astounding and although I know the media affects children, I never realized that there are specific companies targeting children because they know how vulnerable they are. I initially chose the topic because I had heard about Mattel creating a Shopping Barbie. This particular barbie came with a register and a MasterCard to swipe all her purchases, I think this is horrible because it teaches children while they are developing their perception and opinions of the world that it is right to take your MasterCard (the specific brand and logo on the card) to spend money. They associate barbie, a toy that they love with MasterCard. It is very clever of MasterCard...

I know everyone would agree that media and advertising in some ways influences us as adults, I mean I would be lying if I said that seeing a beautiful woman who is thin on TV does not make me a little jealous, or make me a little more critical on my own body and appearance. This is not the only area that the media and advertisers are targeting children now, they have developed advertising plans completely targeting children from 2 years old to middle school age. Advertisers target children indirectly with food advertisements, soda ads, movie ads and even cigarette ads which really shocked me. In my research I found that cigarette advertisers place ads in magazines where they know children and teens will see even though the actual magazine is not intended for children and teens. The advertisers are very intelligent, they have methods of tracking circulation and readership so they are able to identify their audiences and age groups, interests ect, by doing this they can find out how many children read a specific magazine that is intended for their older siblings (for example) and place cigarette ads in them.. Another shocking piece of information I found was that advertisers are teaming up with child psychologists now to find out what areas children are the most vulnerable in, what they are interested in and what celebrities they are the most interested in so that they can use those celebrities to promote certain products that children will be drawn to even though they are not old enough for the product or won't be able to purchase the product until they are older. The goal is to draw them in while they are young and make a product appealing so that when the child is older, they will immediately be drawn to the initial brand they were introduced to, this is called brand loyalty. Marketers trying to create brand loyalty is all over the place, I could go on and on about this but I am going to leave you with a few things I found and you can decide for yourself how you feel.

-James McNEal, Author of a book on Marketing to Kids said “Brand Marketing must begin with children. Even if a child does not buy the product and will not for many years…the marketing must begin in childhood.”

-USA Today printed this article, a "how to"-6 marketing strategies for marketing to children
http://www.usatoday.com/money/advertising/2006-11-21-toy-strategies-usat_x.htm

-According to the American Psychological Association, children lack the cognitive skills and abilities of adults and do not critically comprehend advertisements the same way adults do, children tend to believe advertisements are truthful and accurate.

-In 2007, according to the APA $2 billion was spent on advertising to children

There was so much more info, so I suggest looking into it more- and being careful what kids around you are exposed to, I didn't even touch on the studys focusing on the results of the media on children!