McDonald, K, Week 2

HEY EVERYONE, and welcome back to my blog! I hope you all had a wonderful week and are excited to hear about the experiences we had since the last time I wrote an entry. This week we did everything from facilitations to guest speakers to experiential learning trips. We had a total of eight facilitators this week which allowed to dive deep into our course books and learn about material that we will be able to apply to our experiential learning trips during the next few weeks. We had a guest speaker by the name Paul B. on Thursday and he shared with us his expertise in the IP law industry. And for the highlight of the week, we traveled up to the Corning Museum of Glass and got an inside look on the marketing initiatives they have in place. It was an exciting week, so let's dive right in!

Throughout the week, on many different days, we had facilitations which allowed us to examine our readings and stretch our thinking. We read many sections of the three books we have for this course, and these sections ranged from discussing copyright and trademark laws to explaining the digital disruption and its effects on different industries to looking at brand marketing in sports. The section that I found the most interesting was in The Definitive Guide to Entertainment Marketing when it focused on the digital disruption and how it is effecting cable TV, publishing, and gaming. The digital disruption is caused by society moving mostly online and it has had some major impacts on certain industries. One of the industries that is getting hit the hardest is the newspaper industry. People in today's society want to be able to get their news as quick as possible and so they seek it out online instead of waiting for print newspapers to show up at their house. This is becoming detrimental to newspaper companies and forcing them to come up with new ways to reach customers. Another large section of the reading focused on copyright and trademark laws which was the topic of our guest speaker's talk on Thursday. 

Image taken by Alison Wolfe

Paul B. shared much of his knowledge on the topic with us and it allowed us to see the information in our books in real life. The focus of Paul B.'s talk was trademarks, infringement, and copyright. Trademarks, which do not need to be renewed, are any words, names, or symbols that are used to distinguish goods and services. Infringement is the likelihood of confusion between two items. This can be caused by similarity of goods, purchasing outlets, pricing, or even the look or sound of the name. A copyright is an original work of authorship that does not extend to the idea, only the expression of that idea. All of this information was shared with us, but mirrors much of the information in our book, and I am extremely grateful that Paul B. took time out of his day to provide us with that experience. 

Image taken by Kyra McDonald

For our experiential learning trip this week, we took a bus up to the Corning Museum of Glass. This was extremely exciting as we toured the museum, saw a glass show, and even got to talk with Robert C. who works in marketing for the museum. During our tour of the museum we learned many new things about glass and the history of it. One piece of information that I was not aware of is that glass is actually green, not clear, and that is because of the iron in it. In the middle of our tour, we stopped in to see a glass show where they had a professional blowing glass in front of an audience. When we sat down and talked to Robert C. a little later on, we learned that these glass shows and other glass demonstrations that are put on all over the world are marketing techniques that draw people to the museum and help accomplish the museum mission of telling the world about glass. Robert C. also shared with us how the museum is catering their product, the museum itself, to younger generations and what we learned is that the museum lets kids and teens in for free. Although they lose out on the revenue from those ticket sales, they make up for it in different ways. Hearing from Robert C. was a real pleasure and the whole experience definitely made my week!

Image taken by Kyra McDonald

Image taken by Kyra McDonald

There were so many moments this week that stretched my thinking, whether it was while reading the books and listening to the guest speaker or trying to apply the concepts we learned about entertainment marketing to a slightly different field of arts marketing. As this course continues, I look forward to learning more about media and sports marketing and seeing what we have learned through our books, in action. I hope you all enjoy these updates and make sure to come back next week for more! Ciao!