Ever since my start at The Creamery, it has been smooth sailing. I’ve been able to get to work on time, do my job efficiently, and show the worker I can really be. My last shift though, did not go so well. Personally, I think bad juju reeked throughout the entire building. At the start of the day, one of the customers pulled the fire alarm and made everyone evacuate the building until the authorities came and allowed us back in. Then after that, later that night when I was cleaning the bins of ice cream and wiping the ice off of each station, I went to put the metal holder back into the freezer near the counter and bumped into the glass counter top directly above the ice cream. This made the counter top entirely shatter and go everywhere. My heart immediately dropped as I stood there looking at the damage and was wondering what even just happened. My supervisor immediately came out and her first priority was making sure everyone was safe. She then ordered what to do in this situation and where to start cleaning. I had to take every single 3 gallon ice cream in the scooping areas and throw them away since it wasn’t worth it to take the risk. After cleaning everything up, everyone was really supportive towards me and saying it wasn’t that big of a deal, “shit happens”. I really appreciated this because I felt so bad for the workers who had to help me clean up and also for the customers who couldn’t get the ice cream they wanted. At the end of the night, my life went on, it was an accident so I didn’t in trouble, and everyone was accepting of me haha. Crisis averted.

Yet again, Quentin Tarantino stuns the public with a box office hit titled Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. The movie focuses on characters Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his stunt double/gofer/best friend Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt). Dalton is a washed up “has been” western film star that peaked in the early 50’s. Set in 1969, The plot follows the life of Dalton and how he learns to accept and live with the fact that his career is on the decline. Without giving the rest of movie away, Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie) is part of a sub plot that focuses on the tale of how she was murdered by the Manson Family in real life. Overall, this movie was hard to follow for me due to the fact that I did not know who Sharon Tate was or other names in the movie that were mentioned. This is all due to age, but I feel like the generation of my parents would follow this intensively since they lived through this era where Roman Polanski ruled as a director, westerners were all the rave, and drama with Sharon Tate ran rampant. After the fact, everything clicked and really showed me the genius of Tarantino after researching about this time in history. The detailed aesthetics and camera visuals were breathtaking and the writing was absolutely phenomenal.

This is not the first movie that was Tarantino’s depiction of history though. Inglourious Basterds (2009), rewrote the history of WW2 and *spoiler alert* depicted the “What If” question, what would life be like if Hitler had died during the war. An ending that was delightful to the viewers with heartbreaking counteractions made this movie iconic to not just the U.S., but to the world. Revolving around a modge-podge group of American soldiers who kill nazis for fun, this movie is a masterpiece that deserves the credit it did not receive; its more than that. Watching it for yourself will only explain why. With this in mind, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood repeats this idea of rewriting history and displays how Tarantino wanted the Manson ordeal to end up, while also throwing biographical sequences in about Hollywood celebrities of the time like Steve McQueen and Bruce Lee.

A post synopsis of this movie from myself directly ranks it at about 7.2/10. The movie took way too long to build up and I never really felt a “plot”. It was very non linear, which Tarantino loves to do, but this was non linear without a purpose. The characters and cast were what made this film, but other than that the build up was brutal. The ending came on a little too quick, but it did not cease to amaze. It consisted of little “unimportant” details intricately placed all throughout the movie coming together as one. The gore that usually comes with the name Tarantino was not apparent until the end, but it came with great vengeance and furious anger (Tarantino Pun). Without the ending the movie would be sub par, but Quentin left us in awe once again and showed his true creative colors. If you could not tell that I am a part of this director’s cultish following, I am. Anything Tarantino I’ll talk and from now on, this movie will forever be in my conversations about his world renowned talents as a writer.

View my FYE Video/Dear Senior Me here

-> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUnwaVW78xs

This Summer, my living arrangements have been more than great in giving my roommate and I air conditioning, a roomy dorm, and also a wide array of many food choices to eat every day. With this being said, my Summer has been a blessing. On the other hand, there has been this huge buildup on finding out room assignments for the Fall. With most incoming freshman living in Pollock or East, I hoped to obtain the newly renovated dorms in East. To my surprise though, I was assigned Curtin Hall in East, which is unrenovated. A little bit heated, I at first was mad to find out this news, but then I realized all the perks. I’d still be rooming with my best friend, the room arrangement is, in my opinion, more cozy, and three of my friends from home are in the same building as me. So with all of this being said, there is no need to get stressed out or heated about rooming assignments because it will all get worked out in the end.

After 52 years of being an active company, this “bear” of a brand has been rising since the beginning. Polo Ralph Lauren is very common among Gen Xer’s (people born in the 60’s and 70’s), and is now focusing on gaining the attention of Millenials and Gen Zer’s. In doing so, this company’s marketing spending rose nineteen percent to fund campaign’s that are centered towards appealing to this newer audience. One campaign in particular was the release of the classic polo made from entirely recycled plastic bottles. This is not the first of it’s kind, with companies like The North Face and Patagonia making shirts using a polyester made from recycled plastic. Even Adidas and Timberland have been using recycled plastic in their shoes for years. Although Ralph Lauren is not the first, they are a leader that will make many other famous companies aware and will also attract an audience that is all about benefiting our planet for the better.

This is not the only intuitive campaign that they have recently released though. This last spring of 2019, they released a commercial displaying many different diverse families all having one thing in common; “love”. Titled Family Is Who You Love, the underlying concept of it all is to present how Ralph Lauren is for everyone and not just one particular group. Even though their prices are somewhat higher than others, there are many different ways of acquiring their products. Personally, I own about 7 different Polo Ralph Lauren articles of clothing, but not once have I paid full price for each. I thrifted all of it. With this in mind, I love the look and feel of each shirt and am proud to wear a brand that is so inclusive and beneficial to our society. So me technically being an ambassador of their product every time I wear it, this is helping out and publicizing their brand to the people around me. With all of this in mind, Polo Ralph Lauren is making expansive strides that have raised their quarterly revenue by 7% just by releasing these ingenious campaigns and spending slightly more on marketing.

Pasquarelli, A. (2019, July 30). Ralph Lauren sales rise, thanks to fresh marketing and bigger budgets. Retrieved from https://adage.com/article/cmo-strategy/ralph-lauren-sales-rise-thanks-fresh-marketing-and-bigger-budgets/2188306

Josiah Minotto

Comm 100s: Mass Media & Society

The Pennsylvania State University – Professor Nichols

Student-Led Lecture: “The History of Public Relations”

Summer Session – July 23, 2019

Public Relations as a Whole

Overview

Over the past two hundred and fifty years, public relations have been a staple of American Communications and continues to impact our culture. By definition, public relations is the practice of deliberately managing the spread of information between an individual or an organization and the public. To put it simply, personal relations is earned media. Dating all the way back to 1773, the Boston Tea Party incidence is a prime example of early personal relations. Samuel Adams, a “master of propaganda”, organized the political messages among the colonists to enforce change. Famously inspiring the Boston Tea Party, he ran the show of spreading the need to rally and protest the British in order to gain independence from this monarchy. Inspiring generations to come, he formed the basis for American public relations. Often equated to publicity, personal relations focus is gaining interest toward people or products from the public. This can mean projecting a company’s best interest or even masking certain aspects that a company does not want to display to the public.

Personal relations often involve the countering of negative media impressions of the client that were created by others. During World War 2, the Office of War Information was created to censor war news, document social change, and create a central means for government to communicate about the war. It was basically the head personal relations organization for the government at the time to monitor the country’s image towards the public’s best interest. Continuing to influence the public today, personal relations is a large contributor to how mass media is perceived by the public.

The Barons of Personal Relations

Including many companies such as Fleishman-Hillard, Weber Shandwick, Hill & Knowlton Strategies, Burson-Marsteller, Incepta, Edelman Worldwide, BSMG Worldwide, Ogilvy PR, Porter Novelli, and Ketchum, personal relations has a wide variety of who is on top. As described in advertising, the Big Four are companies that rule the industry: WPP, Omnicom Group, Interpublic, and Publicis. These Big Four companies, with the exception of Edelman and Incepta, own every big public relations firms known worldwide. The key to becoming a baron like these examples is having a global reach. Hill & Knowlton Strategies has 83 offices is 46 countries making it one of the biggest and most diverse PR company. In order to cover a wide variety of business, these firms mostly operate on five prominent activities: corporate communications, financial communications, health care, public affairs, crisis management. With some smaller firms covering less ground, every firm focuses by approaching their activities through three lenses, production, distribution, and exhibition.

Production

The spread of “earned media” always starts with PR companies having a good relationship with relevant news outlets that they can project their clients through. Being codependent, PR staff members create, sell and think up possible sample stories for the journalists/editors. Commonly known as a “press release”, which is a short essay that is written in the form of an objective news story, PR firms find a “hook” to reel in these outlets in order to give a beneficial view of the person or product they are presenting to the public. It cannot be too obviously centered around benefiting the client though, because this isn’t an ad. It is a ploy of subtlety to enter the public’s mind in order to shine light on this person or product. The goal is to impact; for example, if a tech company is about to come out with a new product, their PR team will come up with a way to project how good the product is to possibly a technology magazine. Showing specs and new additions, the PR firm will hope that this never-before-seen product will be shown in a tech magazine in good light. That way, it will appeal to the audience that if this magazine shows how good it is, they will need to purchase it and use it. Successful companies have PR teams that are open, honest, and genuine towards the public because it leads to a strong relationship with the product or person’s audience.

Distribution

After fully preparing the “campaign” or game plan for a client, PR send the materials to the “proper publicity outlets”. In simple terms, this means a media vehicle that can reach the projected audience that PR is targeting. Having pre-set lists of outlets, PR practitioners use the information they have about the audience to decide which outlet would best fit enticing them. Progressive software can even track discussions of the client’s opinion on the person or product to which the PR firm responds by paying people insert comments that reflect positivity towards the client. Press releases in the form of video are also very effective. If a new movie is coming out, interviews given by news outlets to actors/actresses in the film is an example of this. The interview is set up by PR companies and the interview is shot so that it seems exclusive to the news outlet, therefore giving it “originality” for the audience to divulge with an end goal to attract viewers to go see the movie. Using many different methods, personal relations firms have made the distribution of clients to outlets an art.

Exhibition

With both the production and the distribution of the product or person the PR firm is trying to convey in mind, the entire process is nothing if the audience does not find it enticing or appetizing. This is where the exhibition of the client comes into play. Between deadlines and the sheer amount of work handed to journalists to complete, writing a piece of work can cost a lot of time and money. With personal relations, a basic “schedule” is given to these journalists and allow these writers to manage their time with low cost stories. Director’s and editors of news outlets may offset the expensive cost of an original local story by having an already completed low cost work by personal relations. This is all known as “information subsidies”. With this “ease” given to outlets, PR firms can sometimes encounter risk when exhibiting their story. There is not only one PR firm trying to get their clients out in the world at one time, so journalists and director’s can often be selective in what they choose to be in their outlet. Often times, PR clients may not get used which can lead to uneasiness. This is why it is crucial to have a trustworthy personal relations company that has strong relationship’s with outlets to exhibit the client’s product/person. With this, if a PR company’s client has any sort of bad image or material that contradicts the original report and the news outlet finds out, it is very likely that the campaign given by PR will backfire. In all, there are many topics for a PR firm to consider when exhibiting their client to the public.

Black PR Pioneers

As early as the mid-19^th century, leader’s such as Fredrick Douglass became the beginning for African American personal relations. Writing three autobiographies on the events he endured as a slave and free man, this self-taught writer and speaker became internationally known for his earned media towards displaying to the public what slavery really was from a first-hand point of view. This was the beginning of many African American personal relations leaders to come.

Succeeding Douglass came people such as Joseph Varney Baker, Maggie Lena Walker, Patricia Tobin, Dr. Jessie J. Lewis, Sr., Barbara Harris, and many others. All achieving earned media to enhance their businesses and become known is why they are known. Not letting anyone stop or get in their way, the dedication that was taught to them as children stayed with them until the day they passed on. Firm’s such as The Lewis Group, Tobin and Associates, and Joseph V. Baker Associates were all started by these leaders and still are impacting the world of communications today, inspiring many to come.

Works Cited

“Black PR Pioneers.” The Museum of Public Relations, www.prmuseum.org/black-pr-pioneers.

Editors, History.com. “Boston Tea Party.” History.com, A&E Television Networks, 27 Oct. 2009, www.history.com/topics/american-revolution/boston-tea

-party.

Parker, Spidey. “Tom Holland and Jake Gyllenhaal Mexico Press Tour Video! #Tomholland #Spidermanfarfromhome #MCU.” YouTube, YouTube, 4 May 2019, www.youtube.com/watch?v=7WDAY7oSfic.

“PR Timeline.” The Museum of Public Relations, www.prmuseum.org/pr-timeline.

Turow, Joseph. Media Today: Mass Communication in a Coverging World. Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2017.

Off of face value, Professor Firgen’s, my Public Speaking teacher, may seem like a regular guy going through life like the rest of us. This is not the case. Starting off college with the hopes of becoming a pilot, he entered a business major thinking that would be where he ended up degree wise. “Flight Companies love degrees, so I decided to go into college to obtain a business degree, but as it turns out I’m terrible at math.” He told me after I asked where his college career started. After coming to this realization, he decided to pursue a communications degree and immediately fell in love with public speaking. He is currently going into his last year of his graduate program at Penn State and plans to become a public speaking professor at a university that he does not know of yet. His passion for flight has been put on hold due to the shear amount of money that needs to be put in it, but he plans to continue this dream at some point in his life. Through all my years of schooling, I have never met a teacher that was serious about becoming a pilot and for that, this makes Prof. Firgens one of the most interesting teachers I have ever had.

After he had told me about what his aspirations were, we began to talk about myself and how I want to become a biomedical engineer. Starting this plan in the beginning of my senior year of high school, I fell in love with the medical field through a program I took through my high school that took up half of each school day during my last year of high school. Studying at a PSU Branch Campus two days out of the week, taking classes at a local nursing school also for two days out of the week, and shadowing at the Reading Hospital on Friday’s were what this program consisted of. Loving every bit of it, I wanted to apply my math skills and my biology skills to take on becoming a biomedical engineer that designs and creates machinery used in a hospital. Appreciating each bit of my story, we began relating how our lives are similar and how his brother and wife both have careers in the medical field. He personally is very interested in it, but took a different path career wise. Wrapping up the chat after about 25 minutes, we parted ways knowing aspects of each other that we never would have found out without this assignment. Going forward, I plan to try and create a more personal relationship with each professor I have, to create a sense of  similarity that would not happen without initiating conversation. This may not be possible in classes of hundreds of students, but in other scenarios I will try!

Ever since opening, McDonald’s has provided the public with the iconic usage of the Golden Arches. Recently though, not all countries and restaurants have been using this vibrant red and yellow palette and have melded into a rainbow of colors throughout the world. To combat this, the McDonald’s Franchise has turned to the advertising firm Turner Duckworth, who plan to revert back to the roots and go for a simpler approach. This simpler approach consists of using solely red and yellow, but instead of having the “aggressive red” as the highlight, they have started to use the golden yellow as the highlight and slightly accent this with the original red. For the future, McDonald’s is moving forward towards a “feel-good” visual with simplistic patterns.

Personally, I am a big fan of yellow and am totally for this transition. Even though I eat McDonald’s very rarely, I do appreciate aesthetically pleasing art and this is surely all that. Quoting Tyler Brooks, the lead design director of Turner Duckworth, “It was about clearing off the barnacles, we wanted to go back to the basics.” Putting their own twist on it, they definitely went back to the basics to provide the public with feelings of enjoyment as yellow clearly sparks joy in people on sight.

McDonald’s also went ahead and are embracing the fact of irregularity in all of their products and are equating the “flawesome” products to humans due to all of us being flawed. This may be a little to deep for me, but I do appreciate the fact of brands straying away from always being perfect, which is not the case at all when it comes to reality. With this being said, they released a series of visually pleasing ads showing the imperfections of their products through animation and conveying how nothing should be “perfect” when it comes to the visuals of food, that’s what makes it delicious. In conclusion, I still will not eat McDonald’s on the regular simply due to a change in advertising style, but I will appreciate the visuals I see all over their ads.

Diaz, A. (2019, July 18). Inside the new visual identity being served up at McDonald’s. Retrieved from https://adage.com/article/cmo-strategy/inside-new-visual-identity-being-served-mcdonalds/2183141

Ever since the start of Summer, I have been looking for a job due to large amount of free time I have out of class. I applied to many different places on campus including the Penn Stater Hotel, the Nittany Lion Inn, and of course the Berkey Creamery. Hearing back from both the Penn Stater and the Creamery, I had to decide which job to take. At the Penn Stater, I obtained a job as a dishwasher and at the Creamery I got a job as a storefront worker. The Penn Stater is not exactly on campus and is a considerable hike with it being at Innovation Park. Simply due to the closeness of the Creamery, I decided on this job to fulfill my want to work and it was definitely the right decision.

My first day was last week and upon arrival I felt very welcomed by all the workers there. The manager’s on duty showed me around and trained me on scooping ice cream, making milkshakes, and working the cash register. What surprised me was that at the Creamery the “managers” are student advisers from Penn State and are current students here. Alexis, the student adviser who trained me, is going to be a sophomore in the Fall and holds a big responsibility at the Creamery. Aside from training new workers, she makes sure everything is running smoothly and that all the workers are in line doing their job. Personally, I had come from a lot of experience in customer service from high school since I worked at Red Robin for 2 years, so everything came rather easy to me. The only thing that did not come easy was the threatening amount of customers who came through the doors at an alarming rate. The Creamery is busy, busy, busy from the point they open and is a Penn State staple in the Summer, so every worker needs to be on their A-game in dealing with all of these people.

All in all, my first day went very smoothly and fast as I worked at the cash register taking people’s orders of ice cream and sending them on their way. The student advisers even provided lunch with the money we made from tips and got a bunch of pizza and dessert. One of the biggest perks of the job though is free ice cream whenever I want :-), which is big selling point to me since I love ice cream. In conclusion, I plan to stay at this place of work to stay busy and also fulfill my want for ice cream, all the while meeting new people for the start of freshman year.

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Josiah Minotto

Comm 100s: Mass Media & Society

The Pennsylvania State University – Professor Nichols

We Are All (in) Penn State: Diversity (+FYS4)

Summer Session – July 23, 2019

Walking through the HUB one day after getting lunch, I passed the computer/lounge area by the bookstore. Filled with many different people, I decided to ask one man if I could possibly interview him for a blog I currently wrote and posted in. He was sitting alone at a table watching a video while eating Chik-Fil-A, so I thought it was the perfect opportunity. A little skeptical and weirded out at first, Alex, the student I began talking to, agreed to be interviewed and began to chat with me about his life. Making sure that he was not already interviewed by someone, I started off by asking what he was doing at Penn State. What his future aspirations were. He currently is a grad student who recently transferred here from American University and is studying Neuroscience, so right off the bat I could tell he was a very smart and hard worker. He was still new to the campus after only being here for two weeks, so I started to tell him about cool buildings like the IM and the huge library on campus. With this information, I had finally found someone to interview that met all the criteria for this assignment.

Growing up right outside the D.C. Metro area in the suburbs, Alex mostly stayed to himself and played a lot of Nintendo videogames as a child. Continuing this as an adult, he mainly plays newer games on the Nintendo Switch and exercises in his free time. Also, in his spare time, he watches a lot of shows on Netflix ranging from Stranger Things to Psych. Personally, I love both of these shows with a passion and we talked about each show for about ten minutes, finding a good connection between us. Not playing many sports as a kid though, we couldn’t relate to the love of sports that I have including soccer and basketball. So even though we had a few things in common, there were still many differences in personality that existed.

As far as a favorite homecooked meal, he has always loved his mom’s steak, rice, and curry stir-fry and now on campus, he’s a big fan of Chik-Fil-A. Other than food though, his family has never really embraced Indian culture. He was not religious as a kid, he never celebrated any Indian holidays, and he never had family that celebrated Indian holidays either. He mainly lived in the suburbs taking in the “American Dream” that we all strive to achieve. With this in mind, he has not encountered any stereotypes or prejudices at Penn State yet, but he has at his previous school where he achieved his undergrad, American University. One instance he told me was that he sometimes automatically got picked as a group partner to succeed since he was by default thought of as smart. He never got close to his groupmates as friends and they would just use him to do the work. Saddened by this, I never really thought about it that way. To be used as a “good grade achiever” can be disheartening and depressing. I personally have never dealt with this because I sometimes am thought of as the person who brings down the group. This is due to the fact that I tend to ask a lot of questions so that I fully understand the concept at hand, but generally I am a hard worker that achieves good grades. So, what I learned from this certain aspect is that you cannot judge a book by the cover. Although judgements can sometimes get results, automatically thinking how a person is by how they look can be hurtful towards the targeted person.

Circling back to Alex’s major, he fell in love with the brain in high school when he took anatomy and physiology. Upon learning about basic brain structure and anatomy, he decided that this was what he wanted to study in college, furthering his knowledge towards exactly what goes on in the brain. In the future he plans to gain his Ph.D. in Neuroscience and later become a neuroscientist that performs groundbreaking research. His family has always been supportive of him through thick and thin and have always provided insight and advice towards problems thrown his way. He told me throughout our interview that he would not be anywhere without his parents, which proved to me how important family is to him. I totally stand by this and agree fully with him that family is everything. Without my parents, I would not be half the person I am today. Clearly, this is yet another commonality between us that proves that yes, our genealogy may derive from totally different places in the world, but our values are so very similar.

As far as hobbies, Alex loves playing and watching videogame clips. Primarily on the Nintendo Switch, he loves The Legend’s of Zelda series. Recently he has been playing Breath of the Wild, which is a branch of this Zelda series. Prior to interviewing Alex, I have never heard of this game, but he was more than glad to inform me of what it is. In summation, an evil force is brought upon the kingdom of Hyrule and Link, the queens best knight, is tasked with defeating it. The player, such as Alex, is Link and it is a very nonlinear game with no correct order on how to beat the game, a “free-range” as Alex said. Personally, I am not interested in these kinds of games or with Nintendo. I play a lot of Xbox and mostly play sports games like Fifa and Rocket League that have very different playing styles than games that Alex plays. In all, this is yet another difference between Alex and I that is minor, but still provides an example of how we are divergent of each other.

In conclusion, this interview served as an outlet for me to branch out of the tiny box I am in and reach into another person’s life, particularly someone who’s appearance is different than mine. Learning many similar and contrasting aspects between each other, I caught a glimpse of what it is like being a student of color on not just Penn State’s campus, but other college campuses as well and from I learned, it is not easy. I also learned that lifestyles including hard work, the importance of family, and hobbies that you love very well may lead to success, which occurred in Alex’s case. All in all, I am very glad that I met Alex and plan to branch out in the future, making friends with people that I may not usually have friendships with.