The Hawthorne Media Glossary
Key Terms from Marketing, Media and Culture

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A

Advertising
Link to the full Wikipedia entry

Generally speaking, advertising is the paid promotion of goods, services, companies and ideas by an identified sponsor. Marketers see advertising as part of an overall promotional strategy. Other components of the promotional mix include publicity, public relations, personal selling and sales promotion.

History
Advertisements painted on the side of buildings were common in the early-20th century U.S. In ancient times the most common form of advertising was 'word of mouth'. However, commercial messages and election campaign displays were found in the ruins of Pompeii. As printing developed in the 15th and 16th century, the first steps towards modern advertising were taken. In the 17th century advertisements started to appear in weekly newspapers in England and within a century, advertising became very popular.

B

Blog
Link to the full Wikipedia entry

A blog or weblog (derived from web + log) is a web-based publication consisting primarily of periodic articles (normally, but not always, in reverse chronological order). Although most early blogs were manually updated, tools to automate the maintenance of such sites made them accessible to a much larger population, and the use of some sort of browser-based software is now a typical aspect of "blogging".

Blogs range in scope from individual diaries to arms of political campaigns, media programs, and corporations. They range in scale from the writings of one occasional author (known as a blogger), to the collaboration of a large community of writers. Many weblogs enable visitors to leave public comments, which can lead to a community of readers centered around the blog; others are non-interactive. The totality of weblogs or blog-related websites is often called the blogosphere. When a large amount of activity, information and opinion erupts around a particular subject or controversy in the blogosphere, it is sometimes called a blogstorm or blog swarm.

The format of weblogs varies, from simple bullet lists of hyperlinks, to article summaries or complete articles with user-provided comments and ratings. Individual weblog entries are almost always date and time-stamped (but this is not a pre-requisite for being a blog), with the newest post at the top (or bottom) of the page, and reader comments often appearing below it. Because incoming links to specific entries are important to many weblogs, most have a way of archiving older entries and generating a static address for them; this static link is referred to as a permalink. The latest headlines, with hyperlinks and summaries, are frequently offered in weblogs in the RSS or Atom XML format, to be read with a feed reader.

Brand
Link to the full Wikipedia entry

In marketing, a brand is the symbolic embodiment of all the information connected with a product or service. A brand typically includes a name, logo, and other visual elements such as images or symbols. It also encompasses the set of expectations associated with a product or service which typicaly arise in the minds of people. Such people include employees of the brand owner, people involved with distribution, sale or supply of the product or service, and ultimately consumers.

C

Cookies
Link to the full Wikipedia entry

A HTTP magic cookie (usually called simply a cookie) is a packet of information sent by a server to a World Wide Web browser and then sent back by the browser each time it accesses that server. Lou Montulli, a former employee of Netscape Communications, was the first to apply the cookie technique in web communications.

Purpose
Cookies can contain any arbitrary information the server chooses and are used to introduce state into otherwise stateless HTTP transactions. Without cookies, each retrieval of a web page (technically, each component of a web page) from a web site is an isolated event, virtually unrelated to all other views of the site's pages. By returning a cookie to a web server, the browser provides the server a means of connecting the current page view with prior page views. Typically this is used to authenticate or identify a registered user of a web site as part of their first login process or initial site registration without requiring them to sign in again every time they access that site. Other uses are maintaining a "shopping basket" of goods selected for purchase during a session at a site, site personalization (presenting different pages to different users), and tracking a particular user's access to a site.

A cookie may be set either by a web server via a CGI script or by a script, such as JavaScript, running in a web browser.

Creative Commons
Link to the full Wikipedia entry

Description:
The Creative Commons (CC) is a non-profit organization devoted to expanding the range of creative work available for others to legally build upon and share.

The Creative Commons website enables copyright holders to grant some of their rights to the public while retaining others through a variety of licensing and contract schemes including dedication to the public domain or open content licensing terms. The intention is to avoid the problems current copyright laws create for the sharing of information.

The project provides several free licenses that copyright holders can use when releasing their works on the web. They also provide RDF/XML metadata that describes the license and the work that makes it easier to automatically process and locate licensed works. They also provide a 'Founder's Copyright' [1] contract, intended to re-create the effects of the original U.S. Copyright created by the founders of the U.S. Constitution.

Creative Economy
Link to the Creative Economy Council of New England's website

(From the Creative Econoimy Council of New England) The New England Council's June 2000 study, The Creative Economy Initiative: The Role of Arts and Culture in New England?s Economic Competitiveness broadened the definition of the creative sector, and demonstrated that it is a key contributor to New England's economic competitiveness.

Within this newly defined framework, the creative sector includes not only the activities of nonprofit cultural organizations but also commercial enterprises engaged in the applied arts. By further extending the analysis to include individual artists and self-employed creative professionals, the study recognizes the role of creative workers as one of the critical segments of the region?s workforce. The study also examines the importance of arts and culture in contributing to a region's quality of life - an increasingly important factor in defining the competitiveness of communities in New England.

Current TV
Link to the full Wikipedia entry

Current TV is an independent media company, led by former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, lawyer Joel Hyatt and a team of industry professionals and young people. The cable television network went on the air in 2005, at midnight EDT (4:00 UTC) on the morning of August 1st. Until the minute before the launch, the channel carried Newsworld International from the CBC.

Current TV is based off of an experimental 3-year-old Canadan show called ZeD, both of which rely on viewer-submitted content.

D

Data Mining
Link to full Wikipedia entry

Data mining, also known as knowledge-discovery in databases (KDD), is the practice of automatically searching large stores of data for patterns. To do this, data mining uses computational techniques from statistics and pattern recognition.

Data mining has been defined as "The nontrivial extraction of implicit, previously unknown, and potentially useful information from data" 1 and "The science of extracting useful information from large data sets or databases" 2. Although it is usually used in relation to analysis of data, data mining, like artificial intelligence, is an umbrella term and is used with varied meaning in a wide range of contexts.

Direct Marketing
Link to full Wikipedia entry

Direct marketing is a form of marketing that attempts to send its messages directly to consumers, using "addressable" media, such as mail. Therefore, direct marketing differs from regular advertising in that it does not place its messages on a third party medium, or in the agora, such as a billboard or a radio commercial would. Instead, the marketing of the service or commodity is addressed directly to the consumer.

Direct marketing is attractive to many marketers, because in many cases its effectiveness can be measured directly. For example, if a marketer sends out one million solicitations by mail, and ten thousand customers respond to the promotion, the marketer can say with some confidence that the campaign led directly to the responses. By contrast, measurement of other media must often be indirect, since there is no direct response from a consumer. Measurement of results, a fundamental element in successful direct marketing, is explored in greater detail elsewhere in this article.

While many marketers like this form of marketing, it is sometimes criticized for generating unwanted solicitations, which are sometimes referred to as junk mail and spam.

E