During spring and fall semesters of 2017, Clayton State University students in corporate communication minor courses collaborated with film production majors to raise awareness for Big Brothers Big Sisters of Metropolitan Atlanta. Through this three-way collaboration, students helped to build tactical communication with the objective of increasing interest among potential volunteers for the organization’s mentoring program. The deliverables included three videos that Big Brothers Big Sisters used in its drive to increase the number of volunteer mentors in the communities for both the organization and Clayton State. This paper examines the importance of community-engaged service-learning for a student population at a minority-serving predominantly Black institution in Morrow, Georgia, part of the Atlanta metropolitan area. As part of Clayton State’s broader community engagement initiative, this collaboration is being evaluated using a case study design. Consequently, we examine the interdisciplinary roots of the initiative while positioning professional and civic education as simultaneously achievable. Ultimately the research positions Clayton State as a centrifuge for collaborative experience, which serves this dual purpose.
In today’s saturated media environment, advertising messages populate every part of the landscape, causing advertisers to seek new ways to break through the clutter and reach potential consumers. Against this backdrop, a renewed form of selling messages emerges, which continues to develop in pace with ongoing shifts within the advertising and mass media landscapes. This article analyzes the evolving phenomenon of human billboarding. Beginning with an examination of the history of this practice, the paper moves beyond the usual “end of the world as we know it” position of related research and seeks more productive ways to understand this new form of corporate messaging as a strategy for addressing social realities through carnivalesque performance.
In August 2021, the Stone Mountain Memorial Association in Georgia announced the launch of a new logo, removing graphic representation of the mountain's massive monument carving of Confederate leaders. Prior to this change, and for much of the Association's existence since the mid 1920s, representation of the granite carving had been an integral component of the Association's letterheads and logos. This change aimed to separate Stone Mountain Park from its ties to the Ku Klux Klan and from its celebration of the Confederacy. This research reflects on 100 years of visual representation of Stone Mountain Park and examines the 2021 Stone Mountain reimaging campaign in the context of other recent rebranding exercises, including those of Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben's, Land O'Lakes, the Cleveland (formerly) Indians, and the Washington Commanders (formerly Redskins). The analysis considers the implication of rebranding to update a corporate image in response to changing attitudes to stereotypes and racially offensive representation. Through consideration of racial prosopopeia in advertising, this research considers the symbolic power of such branding in consumer-brand identification. The research also examines approaches to brand disidentification, and implications to the broader field of advertising practice, when corporations seek to reposition themselves as no longer representative of a past associated with racial inequity and racism.
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