For my final project (FYE Documentary) I plan on highlighting the key memories of my summer through photos, videos, and interviews of friends that I have made along the way.

My logline is: “College Student reflects upon his eventful first semester at a major university located in a electric college town.”

If ten years ago I told you that there was a challenge where celebrities such as Lebron James, President George W. Bush, Bill Gates, and millions of other people across the globe dumped a bucket of Ice water on themselves to raise money for charity would you believe me? Probably not, but this did happen, and it took over the world, especially the United States for two years. This Challenge raised money for a disease called Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, named after the famous New York Yankees baseball player who developed the disease late in his career forcing him to retire. This campaign not only greatly impacted ALS, but also changed marketing forever. 

The Ice Bucket Challenge is when you are nominated and required to dump a bucket full of ice cold water on your head within 24 hours of your nomination. You also get to nominate 3 people to take on the challenge, further spreading the challenge like wildfire. The first person who took the Ice Bucket Challenge did so for a family member who was suffering from the disease, and from that point, the rest is history.

Prior to the Ice Bucket Challenge, ALS was not known very much at all. The Ice Bucket Challenge led to many doing more and more research on the disease, and led to an exponential increase in donations towards finding a cure to the illness. As a matter of fact, the Wikipedia page for ALS had only an average of 3,000 views before the Ice Bucket Challenge blew up, but after, the website reached a peak of 450,000 viewers.

ALS is a disease that attacks the nerves. It gradually takes kills all nerves in the body, leading to paralysis, and eventually death unfortunately. ALS has no cure yet, but with the funds raised by the Ice Bucket Challenge, there was some significant forms of treatment that have been discovered to slow the process even more.

The challenge caused a 187% increase in donations to the ALS Association. The ALS Association has then sent this money to help fund research to fight and eventually cure this evil disease.

ALS thrived on ethos. This is because there were so many celebrities who accepted the challenge and donated, so everyone else decided to hop on to the trend. Once Hollywood does something, people always follow. So many people took the challenge and donated to the fund to promote their self image and to contribute to a great cause.

I remember when this was going on, I was in 5th grade, 11 years old, and all I wanted was to be nominated. Eventually, my whole family was nominated. We headed down to our farm, filled the tractor bucket with ice and water, and before you knew it, we were all soaked and freezing. We did not care at all because we all knew we were doing it for a great reason. Not only did we participate in the challenge, but we also donated to the cause, and that made everyone very happy to know we were all doing something good.

Some lessons that our group learned through our research on the ice bucket challenge is that there is more than just one way of doing things. You don’t just have to set up a go fund me, go door to door, make advertisements, etc. You can market your product, or in this case, a charity, by making it fun and inclusive, make the audience members fully engaged in what you’re selling and make it something bigger than the product and the money itself. The Ice Bucket Challenge did not just impact ALS, it changed all of marketing. There are many lessons and strategies that marketers can take and have taken from this Challenge. The Ice Bucket Challenge changed the marketing world for the better and kickstarted the new era of marketing, social media marketing. 

For my photo recreation assignment, I felt like it would be a missed opportunity to not recreate a photo of my favorite hockey player. Therefore, I decided to use this picture of Marc Andre Fleury from the 2017 NHL Expansion Draft where he was caught waving to the crowd.

I started watching hockey when I was 4 years old, and my favorite team has always been the Pittsburgh Penguins. I have always been fascinated by the goalie position, so of course my favorite hockey player became Marc Andre Fleury, who was the goalie for the Penguins from 2003 all the way until the night that this picture was taken. Not only is Flower my favorite goalie, I was once told by an old coach of mine that I looked a little like the younger Fleury, so maybe in 20 years the resemblance will be a little bit closer.

As for the picture, I got my brother to get the camera up close to me with a heavy flash in my face in a dark room to try to recreate the spotlight effect. I also threw on a collared shirt and a hockey jersey in an attempt to best mimic Fleury’s picture. The final touch was the awkward smile and hand wave combo, finalizing my recreation of this iconic picture that is now five years old.

I chose this specific picture because I knew right away that I wanted to do something Penguins related. And who else to choose than my childhood idol right? Even after Fleury was taken away from Pittsburgh, I have followed his career ever since, and I even jumped on the Vegas Golden Knights bandwagon in 2018 just because I wanted to see Fleury win another Stanley Cup (and because I was mad that the Penguins let him go the season before).

I tried my hardest to recreate the feel, texture, and proper lighting for this picture. I believe that given my surroundings and what was accessible to me, that I did a pretty good job at doing so.

All white platform shoes

Black and White Checkered Vans 

Unique Nike “Air” High-tops

                                                                                                  Mismatching Navy and Yellow Crocs

To Natalie and I, diversity means understanding people’s uniqueness and bringing them together to make an environment of difference, variety, and inclusion. 

Over the weekend, my friend Natalie and I decided to embark on a trip around campus with one goal in mind: capturing diversity. How we were going to go about this was a mystery. We decided we would start taking pictures of things and come up with a theme as we went–our original idea was backpacks, but we found it rather difficult to find anyone with a backpack on a Saturday. 

We tried everything from hairstyles to shirts, but we ended up settling on shoes. Shoes are an excellent way in which someone goes about expressing themselves. A pair of shoes tells a lot about a person. For example, if someone is wearing sandals, you can assume that they will be having a more relaxed day, and not going to the gym or for a hike, because people wear different shoes for different events. 

The first pair of shoes are an all-white platform style laced shoe. When we approached these ladies as we were walking by the creamery, they were more than happy to participate in our project. They expressed how overjoyed that they were to hear about Penn State Students wanting to capture the diversity around our wonderful campus. The all-white style of shoes is a very minimalistic style that works with anything, no matter how painful they are to clean. You can wear them to go out with friends, go to a party, or just as a final piece to put together the perfect outfit. I also noted that as I looked around, I think these were also the only platform shoes that we came across. 

Our second pair of shoes are the classic black and white checkered vans. I believe that most own or have seen these wonderful shoes, but everyone also knows the struggle it is to keep these clean like white shoes. This pair here looked fresh out of the box, although I’m not exactly sure if they are. I personally own a pair of these shoes, and mine are dirtied and torn, so the respect I have for this student to have a nice clean pair is high. He also gets bonus points for noting that he was working on a project that was similar to ours!

At the beginning of our shoot, we decided that we would start at the Findlay Commons, for it was close to the halls and it was the middle of the day. We came across a student wearing shoes that I do not think Natalie or I have ever seen before. This student was wearing black and white Nike Air high-tops with the word “Air” printed real large on the heel. They also had holes in the bottom by design, which I thought was really intriguing. He was more than happy to pose for our shots, and then we shook hands, thanked him, and carried on with the shoot. 

Right after we left the commons, we saw a young man about to walk into Brumbaugh Hall, but we couldn’t help but look at this guy’s outlandish shoe choice. He wore a mismatched navy and yellow Crocs. We thought that they were cool for a couple of different reasons. Both Natalie and I grew up wearing Crocs, so it sparked a feeling of nostalgia for the both of us. We also thought “who would dare wear mismatched shoes,” but clearly this student dared, and he rocked it. As Natalie snapped the pictures, he questioned whether this was for a project or not, trying to be funny, so we all shared a laugh and assured him that this is in fact for a project. 

The variety of shoes that we saw on this day were a clear indicator for our campus’s diversity. Each pair represented a story and a purpose for being worn, reminding us all that we are surrounded by diversity, which is truly a wonderful thing to have. Without diversity, we would all be the same, wearing the same boring clothes, saying the same boring things, with the same boring lives. Diversity brings our entire campus together as one, and we all contribute to it by bringing our own stories to share.

The Penn State Library

Today we visited the Penn State Library for our meeting of our Comm100 class. We all met on the steps of the library with Professor Nichols and posed for a photo before entering. When we first got inside, I was a bit overwhelmed (I’m not the best with revolving doors) by the size of this library. It was nothing like any library I’d ever seen before, for it is also the first library I’ve ever seen with an elevator and more than 2 floors. The librarian who guided us into our room of computers was very kind and patient with all of us first year students trying to take in and navigate this masterpiece of a library.

Once we sat down at our respective computers, our librarian guided us through the steps of navigating the library’s website. She showed us the ropes of finding basically any book, journal, article, magazine, or anything else we may need to use while we are at Penn State. I also learned that if the text that I need is not in the library at University Park, but it is in a library on another Penn State campus, I can have that text sent to the University Park library and I can access it that way. It was made very clear that any library on any Penn State campus is the same library, which in my opinion is extremely convenient.

After learning about accessing texts, we were taught about how to access databases to find any kinds of journals or any other texts we could use for research. Did you know that Penn State has over 700 databases accessible to their students? Neither did I!

Overall, the day in the library was a good one, I got to learn lots of helpful information, start breaking ground on my new group case study on the Ice Bucket Challenge, and I got to a part of a great experience with my peers. I would call that a very successful Thursday at Penn State.

When it comes to the audience of a product, industries must identify their target audience. The target audience is made up of demographics–race, gender, age group, household income, etc.–and psychographics–attitude, motivation, behavior, personality type, etc. Both XXL Magazine and Rolling Stone Magazine are music and pop culture related, but they each have their own separate target audiences. Rolling Stone targets A broader audience than XXL, where Rolling Stone targets both men and women evenly, mainly white (71% of their audience is white), ages 18-49 (makes up 59% of their audience). XXL, on the other hand, is predominantly male (78%), African American (67%), age 21-29 (50%). While both XXL and Rolling Stone are magazines that cover similar genres, they cover those genres in their own unique ways to appeal to their respective audiences. 

XXL is a hip-hop magazine that targets specifically African American men aged 21-29. This specific edition (April 26, 2022 issue) features Playboi Carti–a popular rapper–on the cover with the words “one of a kind” gracing it next to him. One page is entirely dedicated to the rapper Future and a timeline of all of his album releases. There is a Question and Answer publication with Playboi Carti where he elaborates on how he is “one of a kind” as stated on the cover. There was also a piece on Kanye West and how the only people truly defending him in his scandal with Kim K and Pete Davidson are his true friends, making this a real eye-opening experience for Kanye. There are lots of pieces with figures around the hip-hop scene, there is a page dedicated to news about DaBaby. This magazine also contains lots of different fonts, styles, colors, etc. to make it stand out to a much younger audience. XXL does a good job of knowing their audience and what they would want to see and read about to get them to continue reading their issues as they come out. 

On the other hand, Rolling Stone is a general pop culture and music magazine that features popular Youtuber Mr. Beast on the cover (labeled the Creator’s Edition). There are also previews for the other featured stories on the cover–A piece on Bella Poarch and “Class of 2022 Rising Stars”–with Mr. Beast in the background laying on a canvas of money, with money covering his torso. This shows the status that Mr. Beast and creators alike hold in our society. They also have a “Creators to Watch” publication. This edition is very specific to the influencer side to pop culture over music. It also seemed as though Rolling Stone was trying to put out publications that anyone would read. For example, there is a memorial story on Taylor Hawkins–the late drummer for the Foo Fighters–that could appeal to the older part of their target audience, whereas all of the publications on influencers appeals to the younger generation–men and women alike. Differently from XXL, the way that Rolling Stone displays their pieces is more bland, for they use less unique fonts, less color, etc. Reading Rolling Stone was like a step up from reading a novel for me. When I read XXL, I was actually thoroughly enjoying it, and I felt engaged with the magazine because of all of these cool colors, fonts, etc. All in all, Rolling Stone Magazine definitely is much more broad than XXL in terms of what they produce due to the spread in their target audience being a mainstream magazine. 

When looking at the media kits for both magazines, I found something interesting. The way that each magazine prices their ads are very different. For example, XXL prices their ads by per inch and per word, and Rolling Stone is priced by whether the ad has color, how much of the page is covered by the ad–full-page, half page, and quarter page–instead of by inch. To buy space for an ad in XXL, you can expect to pay $495 per inch and $11.95 per word. In Rolling Stone, however, to buy a full page ad is $122,941(four color) and $110,650 (Black and White). A half page ad is $73,760 (four color) and $66,390 (Black and White). Cover ads range from $153,680 to $114,950 depending on which one you buy. Looking at this, Rolling Stone’s prices are a lot more “scary,” per se, because of the high numbers. Their prices are also that high because they have a wider range for their target audience, so you would think that they sell much more than XXL, right? That is wrong, for in 2012, XXL was the highest selling magazine in their category over Rolling Stone magazine. The seemingly low prices to place an ad in XXL and the higher sales should mean that there are more ads bought for XXL. 

When looking through the magazine, I found something that surprised me after looking over the media kits. The amount of ads in XXL Magazine was nothing compared to the amount of ads in Rolling Stone. This is likely because Rolling Stone is the “mainstream” magazine that has a much broader audience than that of XXL. Rolling Stone featured ads from companies like Meta, Fancy Cat treats, Scope Mouthwash, a new show on Hulu, Dog Chow, and Stihl. XXL featured ads from Copenhagen, Slam Goods, and Branson. As stated earlier, there were barely any ads in XXL compared to Rolling Stone. I believe that this actually helps me choose XXL over Rolling Stone because XXL is filled with content and not ads, they appeal more to the consumer and not the ads put into it. XXL lets their brand sell itself, where it seems that Rolling Stone relies on heavy advertisement endorsements with other companies in their magazine to sell it. 

Rolling Stone and XXL are both great magazines, but they appeal to different audiences of the same genre. XXL targets mainly black men in their twenties, where Rolling Stone targets white men and women from age 18-49 (a much broader audience). I think that XXL is a better brand due to them selling their brand using emotion, they make their magazine look different (colorful, cool fonts, pictures that look very nice) to make the consumer happy, where Rolling Stone relies heavily on the logos that their ads bring to the table to buy their consumers. I think the 2012 calendar year is a great example to show that people do not want advertisements shoved in their faces, for they did not pay to see these ads–or so they think–they paid to read the content of the magazines. Both XXL and Rolling Stone are magazines that I like, and they target very different audiences, but I think that XXL does a much better job at bringing in buyers than Rolling Stone does because of what they put into their magazine and how they make it look. 

Works Cited

1. 2012 Media Kit – AMERICA\’S Media Marketing – Free Download PDF, https://nanopdf.com/download/2012-media-kit-americas-media-marketing_pdf. 
2. 2022 Media Kit – Rolling Stone. https://brandstudio.rollingstone.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/01/Rolling-Stone_Media-Kit_January-2022_FINAL-compressed.pdf. 
3. “2022-05-01rollingstone_compressed. Pdf.” Google Drive, Google, drive.google.com/file/d/1gMmMgE8d9tN2m4Lu7v5u6ki4K2xTXiVB/view. 
4. Xxlstaff. “Playboi Carti Covers XXL Magazine’s Spring 2022 Issue.” XXL Mag, 12 Apr. 2022, www.xxlmag.com/playboi-carti-xxl-magazine-spring-2022-issue-cover/.