The Benetton Group Essays - Benetton Group, Shock Advertising

The Benetton Group Essays - Benetton Group, Shock Advertising The Benetton Group The Benetton Group The Controversy Continues Problem Identification Benetton, the world famous clothing producer, once again dives into social issues that the United States may not be ready for. The Italy based group is well known for their shocking world issue advertisements that only bear the company logo. In fact, Benettons advertisements traditionally do not feature the clothes it sells; only the issues play the lead role. After years of controversy over ads such as AIDS, war, interracial relationships, and priests kissing nuns, it may be time for Benetton to campaign about something other than controversial social issues, like clothes. On January 1, 2000, Benettons new advertising campaign wasnt about sweaters or pants, but about convicted murderers that are on death row. The death row ads feature portraits of American death row inmates in prison uniforms with the slogan Sentenced to Death. The ads give the inmates name, date of birth, crime, and expected method of execution. Within the campaign, inmates also talk about topics ranging from their childhood to their dreams, everything except their victims. According to CNN, victims rights advocates are outraged as well as are the individuals that lost loved ones to the profiled inmates. Once again, Benetton is faced with another controversy that could perhaps worsen their already poor US market share. According to the New York Stock Exchange, where The Benetton Group is publicly traded, it seems that the company has lost over ten dollars per share since their peak of 50 15/16 in January. This decrease could be attributed to many things, but perhaps the most significant was the February announcement that Sears would immediately pull Benetton designed clothes from all 400 of its stores that had been selling the Benetton USA line. The Benetton USA line was specifically designed for Sears when the two companies joined last summer to introduce a new line of juniors, kids, and mens apparel. Troubled by the campaign, Sears renegotiated its contract with Benetton to gain the right to preview future Benetton ad campaigns. A revised clause in the contract also gave Sears the ability to withdraw from the deal without penalty if the two parties were unable to agree on future ca mpaigns, according to CNN. Regardless of these changes, the controversy was too significant for Sears to ignore due to the hundreds of consumer complaints that poured into the store after the campaign released. According to the February 21, 2000 article in Advertising Age, a Sears spokesman said the chain allied itself with Benetton because We thought they were past that and had come to a point where they were interested in selling merchandise. The whole episode is tragic, for the victims, for Sears and for Benetton. However, Sears is not the only one taking action against the company. According to CNN, it was announced on February 10, 2000 that the state of Missouri was suing Benetton for ads featuring death row inmates that reside in Missouri prisons. Missouri claims that the company deceived the state when it used the death row inmates as part of its ad campaign. The state thought the inmates were being interviewed for a project sponsored by the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. In addition, according to the February 19, 2000 article in The Economist, a Benetton spokesperson in New York admitted that payment was made to two inmates for the rights to their likeness. The state accuses Benetton of fraudulent misrepresentation, trespass by deceit and trespass by exceeding the scope of consent. Although the problems with Sears and Missouri could have significantly decreased the overall value of Benetton, the fact remains that consumers ultimately decide the fate of a company by whether or not they shop there. It seems that sources such as CNN, Wall Street Journal, and Advertising Age, among others, have touched upon US consumer reactions to the new ad campaign. Overall, it is not being accepted well in the United States and an already weak market will continue to weaken as long as Benetton refuses to change its US advertising techniques. According to the Washington Post, Benetton is standing by its campaign. In fact, its US director of communications stated, Once again, its very hard for people to see what

Multicultural education scenario Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Multicultural education scenario - Essay Example How multicultural education would be deemed as effective here totally depends on my undertakings. I would have to find out the exact ways through which their understanding of education would increase and make them feel comfortable with the studies at hand. This will propel them to attain education at their best and thus move ahead with the basics of their respective lives in a reasonable way. I would find out how they will be more effective than they are at the present, and thus offer them solutions which are based on pure logic and comprehension. For making them realize that education is the key to open any lock within their lives, I would ensure that education is instilled within them in a very hassle-free way, so is the case with the 4 students who are having special needs and have to bring in a great amount of hard work with each passing day of their lives. It is important to know that the children who hail from the poorest of backgrounds would have to be considered for their edu cation norms more than anyone else. They would have to be given the special emphasis which is direly required in this day and age. Within the aegis of the classroom, these students would be supported by encouragement and special efforts shall be made to let them get acquainted with the other students in the classroom as well. What remains important however is a vision to move ahead in life and find out about its different nuances through hard work, devotion and complete commitment coming to the fore. The types of activities that could be done within the classroom include the making up of groups which shall comprise of students from different backgrounds so that they have a better understanding and interaction levels with one another. This would set the ball rolling as far as their respective domains are concerned, and they would feel better at interacting with the ones who are present within their respective groups. Role-play could be deemed as one of the most looked after propositi ons within the activities that could be inculcated within the classroom understandings, and this shall pave the way for the future success of the classroom in the long run. Each group could allow the others (groups) to learn more because each of these would be able to bring in the very best with the changing activities that they have been offered with. The groups would therefore tie in the results with the comprehension that has been reached upon, as it will assist in a better understanding of how things shape up within their respective realms and how serious consideration should be paid towards realizing where the other group has derived its basis from, in the wake of reaching the desired results (Davis, 2007). The learning tangent is such an important one for the 21 students within this classroom setting because it teaches more than mere education; it makes them realize who they really are essentially. One of the most significant reasons behind preaching multicultural education li es in the fact that it does away with the ailment of stereotyping within the classroom. Nearly all of the students understand that stereotyping someone due to one’s diverse background or merely an ailment is not something which

Biochemistry Assignment Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 250 words

Biochemistry - Assignment Example Glutamate transmits quick and precise signal in the primary significant sensory and motor tracts. It also makes numerous connections between various parts of the cerebral cortex that forms the network responsible for high mental functioning (Broda 66). Gamma- Aminobutyric acid (GABA) is an amino acid synthesized from glutamate by an enzyme known as the glutamic acid decarboxylase (GAD). The dominant inhibitory transmitter exists in almost all parts of the nervous system. In addition,GABA acts as a presynaptic inhibitory transmitter in many circumstances.GABA plays a key role in the development of the nervous system, and it occurs in the early stages even before the establishment of the synapses. Once the synapses begin to occur, GABA plays a role as an excitatory transmitter as it depolarizes the postsynaptic neuron. Therefore, GABA is likely to be the first excitatory transmitter that shape neuronal networks before glutamate took over as the key excitatory transmitter (Dishman, O’Connor, &Tomporowski

Prosodic Features for Sentence Segmentation Dissertation

Prosodic Features for Sentence Segmentation - Dissertation Example The most emphasis in this approach is put on the duration of pauses between words. Longer pauses are assumed to be sentence boundaries. The word boundary method presupposes that such pauses logically occur only at the end of sentences. This is true on many occasions since the place to pause is really at the end of sentences. The word boundary method is therefore quite useful especially when analyzing short sentences (Stolcke, & Shriberg, 1996, 139). The detection of sentence boundaries is one of the initial steps that lead to the understanding of speech. The fact that speech recognizer output lacks the normal textual cues such as headers, paragraphs, sentence punctuation and capitalization was also mentioned. However, speech provides prosodic information through its durational, intonational and energy characteristics. In addition to its relevance to discourse structure in spontaneous speech and its ability to contribute to various tasks involving the extraction of information; prosod ic cues are naturally unaffected by word identity. It should therefore be possible to improve the robustness of lexical information extraction methods which are based on ASR (Hakkani-Tur et al 1999). Sentence segmentation is required for topic segmentation and is also needed to separate long stretches of audio data before parsing (Shriberg et al 2000). Sentence segmentation is critical for applications that are used for obtaining information from speech because information retrieval techniques such as machine translation, question answering and information extraction were basically developed for text based applications (Shriberg et al 2000; Cuendet et al 2007). Kolar et al (2006, p. 629) indicates that standard automatic speech recognition systems only output a raw stream of words. It therefore means that important structural information such as punctuation is missing. Punctuation defines sentence boundaries and is fundamental to the ability of humans to understand information. Natu ral language processing techniques such as machine translation, information extraction and retrieval text summarization all benefit from sentence boundaries. According to Mrozinski et al (2006) spontaneous speech is generally affected negatively by ungrammatical constructions and consists of false starts, word fragments and repetitions which are representative of useless information. Output from automatic Speech-To-Text (STT) system is affected by additional problems as the word recognition error rates in spontaneous speech is still high. Sentence segmentation can lead to an improvement in the readability and usability of such data; after which automatic speech summarization can be used to extract important data. Magimai-Doss et al (2007) indicates that the aim of sentence segmentation is the enrich the improve the unstructured word sequence output for automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems with sentence boundaries in order to make further processing by humans and machines easie r. Improvements in performance were shown in speech processing tasks such as: speech summarization, named entity extraction and part-of-speech tagging in speech, machine translation, and for aiding human readability of the output of automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems when sentence boundary information was provided. Annotation relating to sentence boundary was found to be useful in the determination of â€Å"semantically and prosodically coherent boundaries for

Eye of the beholder :: essays research papers

?Beauty is in the eye of the beholder? is one of the most commonly known proverbs. In the Twilight Zone?s short film, ?Eye of the Beholder? that same proverb is used as a metaphor to demonstrate how beauty and acceptance are illustrated in the real world. The film tells the story of a woman whose hideously deformed face has made her an outcast all of her life. Now she faces her nearly a dozen and final operation for a last chance to look normal with the help of unseen surgeons. First, in the ?Eye of the Beholder? we see the bandaged woman?s craving for normality. She is constantly haunted by the memory of a child screaming because of her physical deformed appearance. We are also reminded that those who look ?different? will be sent of to an isolated place with others of the same ?disability.? With that being said a sense of Nazism idealistic society comes to mind. For example, the Nazi?s sent those who looks different than the normal beautiful blued eyed, blond Germans, to a concentration camp. Moreover, the woman in the ?eye of the Beholder? not only wanted beauty but she felt the need for acceptance. She was denied this when she was taken to a disability camp. It?s amazing how in the movie, people were separated and treated unequally because of their physical appearances, and as result, they could not share the same society. This is in fact is a metaphor for how discrimination was once in extreme existence in this society. For example, African Americans once had to use: different bathrooms, water fountains, and were even segregated to non-white school. They were even isolated to the worse parts of the cities. In conclusion, in the Twilight Zone?s short film, ?Eye of the Beholder? the themes of beauty and acceptance are used as a metaphor for the

The Growth Stage

The growth stage brings many challenges to blended value businesses, and one of the most significant concerning mission preservation involves changes in leadership during scaling, especially to the role of the founder. It is common in early-stage businesses for the founder to guide all aspects of the organization. When companies begin to grow, however, things start to change. From this moment onward, the involvement of the founder with the company must evolve as much as the firm itself does. At this point, formal governance systems and processes must be created to take the place of the informal ones employed during the start-up phase. The transfer of responsibility from the charismatic individual, the founder, to the governing board is one hallmark of a more substantial shift toward a more systemized, collaborative approach that needs to take place in all businesses as they grow (Clark, Emerson & Thornley, 2014). For social entrepreneurships, it can signal a dangerous moment for the social mission. Often the founder's leadership—his or her passion and vision—is what establishes the clear connection between the business and mission in the first place. As the leadership shifts from founder to governing board, new ways need to be found to embed mission in the systems that will provide direction for the business from this point on. Shifting leadership from founder to board can be a challenge for many types of organizations, but it may present a particular obstacle for social entrepreneurships. The figure of the founder looms large in the social impact world encouraged by a high number of prizes and programs aimed at individual entrepreneurs. Partly as a result of such well-meaning support efforts, some founders have risen to personal prominence alongside their blended value companies, becoming public faces for their businesses, ambassadors for their brand with high media, and field level visibility. At the growth stage, such over-emphasis on founders can create the conditions under which so-called founder's syndrome can arise.

The relationship between the media and society is...

The relationship between the media and society is regularly changingas media technologies are constantly developing, and its audiences are continuously adapting. ]Therelationship has been constant since the beginning of the 20th century, so inevitably it has certain effectson the people it has been reaching out to for so many years. The communicators of media messages can hold power over their audiences by uses of agenda setting, which is the media’s ability to raise importance of issues through repetitive news reporting (Severin and Tankard 2010) and propaganda techniques, but audiences also sometimes play an active role in its reception and selection of messages they receive. Elihu Katz says that effects of media are related to†¦show more content†¦It says that media messages have universal effects on its audiences that receive them (Severin and Tankard 2010), signifying a weak and passive audience that is easily susceptible to persuasion. This persuasion can be e ither negative or positive, and the theory claims that the audience will believe anything they see or hear. The bullet theory has less research than other theories, because of the fact that it categorizes audiences broadly, and it is more difficult to conduct studies on a general claim. However, a study was done that examined how the bullet theory may have applied to society by usage of propaganda in World War I (Severin and Tankard 2010). The US nation was collectivelyterrified of the power that Adolf Hitler had in his control over his country, and media messages at the time enhanced this fear by constantly stating that Hitler could have the same type of effective influence on the American people in forthcoming years (Severin and Tankard 2010). Influential figures such as Walt Disney, made propaganda pieces like cartoons detailing the horrible ways of the Nazi Germans at the time, shaping the way in which audiences looked at the issues of the war (Shale 1982). The example is vali d, butalso relatively weak feared perceptions of the actions of Hitler during WWII and after were widely held globally. It is difficult to measure such an extreme