July 21, 2005
Of celebrity voices and imploding bubbles
WHOSE VOICE WAS THAT, ANYWAY?: An article under the headline “Voice Lessons” in a recent edition of Time Magazine’s special section Inside Business quoted Mark Forehand, a UW associate professor of marketing and international business, on the relative effectiveness of celebrity voice-overs in television commercials.
Forehand and Andrew Perkins of Rice University, the story said, conducted a study of viewer reactions to voice-overs by well-known performers David Duchovny, Donald Sutherland, David Hyde Pierce and Willem Dafoe, each of whom pitches for various products. “The commercial watchers’ prior attitudes toward the celebrity influenced how much they liked or disliked the brand,” the story stated, “but surprisingly, the celebrity endorsements evoked stronger feelings for the brand when viewers weren’t sure to whom the familiar voice belonged.”
Forehand was then quoted: “When they recognize the celebrity, it seems potentially manipulative, and they wind up overcompensating. But when they don’t recognize the celebrity they generalize over to the brand.” The answer for marketers, the article suggested, was finding the right voice talents — those with affable, distinctive voices who also are not easily be identified. The study is expected to be published later this year in the Journal of Consumer Research.
SONOLUMINESCENCE: That’s the term for when a tiny bubble within a liquid is made to implode by sound waves. The process creates a flash of light that has been much studied in recent years, according to a recent article by Kenneth Chang in The New York Times. The surface of that imploding bubble can reach up to 25,000 degrees Farenheit — twice as hot as the sun itself — and the center may be even hotter.
The article described experiments at the University of Illinois and at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee along these lines. UI scientists, the article explained, created a state called plasma inside those bubbles. “Their finding supports the intriguing notion that it may be possible to compress these bubbles so violently that vapor molecules in them are heated to multimillion-degree temperatures,” which suggests possibilities for the process as a power source one day, the article stated.
Many scientists remain skeptical because the Oak Ridge experiments, which resulted in detection of “byproducts of fusion,” have not been reproduced, “but the science increasingly appears at least plausible,” the article stated. That led Lawrence A. Crum, UW professor of electrical engineering, to comment, “I’m becoming skeptical about my earlier skepticism.” The article said he then added, “I won’t say it’s likely.”
ADEQUACY ADDENDUM: Public schools in Kentucky were the topic of a recent New York Times article that quoted Jacob Adams, research associate professor and director of the School Finance Redesign Project at the Daniel J. Evans School of Public Affairs. The article discussed ongoing needs in the Kentucky schools despite improvements sparked by a 1990 court decision, and mentioned “the adequacy movement,” a nationwide effort to increase school funding.
“The important thing to remember is that adequacy doesn’t ask the question, ‘Are you spending money and doing a good job with it?’ Adams said. “It asks the question, ‘Did you put enough money into the system to achieve the results that states have never achieved before?’”
