Meet MixedMediaWatch

My soulmate.

Our courtship was a difficult and strange one. Difficult because it took me a very long time to find him, and strange because we’ve never even spoken to each other. In fact, I don’t even know his name. We are linked by our mutual affinity for the tag “advertising.”

I found my soulmate as I was exploring Delicious, which, as you will remember from my previous post, is a social bookmarking site. I eventually stumbled upon his page as I was searching bookmarks for specific tags. I had typed in the tags “advertising” and “asianamerican,” and the rest is history.

Mixed Media Watch has a total of 137 tags that cover a wide range of topics from “academia” to “yellowperil.” What I discovered was that his tags related to a couple of recurring themes, such as diversity and social issues. For example, his top 10 tags included “africanamerican” and “asianamerican” as well as “raciststereotypes” and “racism.” His tags are what drew me to his profile because it appears that we share a lot of the same interests relating to culture and community. Although his attention is not as specific as mine, for he does not look at only one ethnic group, he does show concern for the proper representation and treatment of minorities.

However, what really resonated with me were his bookmarks under the tag “advertising.” Although he only had nine advertising bookmarks, they, of course, pertained to the subject of racial stereotyping. This is exactly what I hope to touch upon in my blog, and Mixed Media Watch proved to be an excellent resource on this topic. It helped that he was very specific on how he organized his tags. First, each tag had a list of related tags, so it was very easy for me to find those advertising bookmarks that also talked about Asian Americans (2 out of the 9 bookmarks). Secondly, he was very thorough because each bookmark had a comment or abstract. This way, I was able to read the descriptions of the articles without even having to click on them and already see which would be the most useful.

I found a few blogs which I promptly added on to my blog roll. There were also a lot of great articles and sites. One bookmark took me to a blog post which talked about the lack of diversity in the advertising agency due to current hiring practices. This article really got me thinking. Up to this point, I had only been concentrating on representation in actual advertisements and not in the actual business. Isn’t it possible that the lack of minorities in advertising could be an influencing factor on how advertisements are aimed toward minorities? This could be an awesome topic to write about in future blog posts.

Another bookmark took me to a press release about how advertising firms are starting to consider the Asian American market but have such a limited view on about what this ethnic group is interest in – gadgets, anime, and video games. Consequently, the types of products that they will market to Asian Americans will also be narrow in its scope. Wow. Another great topic for a future blog post.

I believe that a mark of a great relationship is the potential to grow and learn, and in the short amount of time since I found Mixed Media Watch, I’ve already learned a great deal. A soulmate is very hard to find. Luckily, I’ve found one that I believe will be there for me whenever I need another great resource.