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The appeal of Zach Braff as measured on the Internet medium: A critical analysis of the actor’s presence on myspace.com and lastkissmovie.com
Rich Stromberg Doctoral candidate, Journalism and Public Communications University of Alaska Anchorage September 2006 Click here to view in Word format.
Abstract A review of existing research did not reveal any previous study in which Zach Braff’s appeal had been analyzed in any way. During August of 2006, more than 25,620,000 hits across Zach Braff’s myspace account, zachbraff.com lastkissmovie.com and several placebo sites were analyzed to study the gender, age, ethnicity, sexual orientation and religious aspects of site visitors. 7,644 comments on myspace and zachbraff.com were studied using key phrases to detect proposals of marriage and other offers. Kudos ratings where compared across varying blog topics and Braff’s claim of reading every comment was investigated. Braff appeal was studied comparing lastkissmovie.com with several placebo movie Flash™ sites, as well as music downloads from his myspace page. INTRODUCTION AND BACKGROUND During a two-week period in August of 2006, extensive study was performed on visitors to Zach Braff’s myspace page, zachbraff.com and lastkissmovie.com using personal data collected from the visitors’ cookies along with demographic data available for each myspace member. The relational database manager at myspace was instrumental in providing much of the data for the study, while his college roommate Lenny hacked the data from zachbraff.com and lastkissmovie.com and helped us set up the placebo Web sites. This period coincided with a lead up to the Sept. 15 release of Braff’s latest movie “The Last Kiss” and the new season of “Scrubs” on NBC. Time proximity to these events undoubtedly has an impact on the results, but only to magnify effects already present. The study was limited to U.S. respondents due to resource limitations and our lack of ability to translate blog responses in Mandarin, Kryg and that African language with the clicking noises.[1] REVIEW OF LITERATURE Our team of researchers spent a week prior to the actual study, reviewing Braff’s Web site and myspace page along with all the nuances of “The Last Kiss” Web site. Unfortunately, once the review was completed, all the female researchers adored Braff to the point that they would introduce bias into the study and were subsequently released.
Since our volunteer researchers were predominately women for both the initial literature review and the subsequent callout[2], further literature review was cancelled[3] and we employed the services of an anonymous database manager at myspace[4] and his hacker college roommate Lenny. HYPOTHESIS People – especially females – will love anything, so long as it is associated with Zach Braff. The degree of desire or appeal is irrespective of the product itself, but is directly correlated to the amount of Braff used to plug the product. METHOD In addition to the aforementioned Web sites, placebo movie sites were set up using Flash™ software to emulate lastkissmovie.com. The sites include Braff in remakes of Hook, Ishtar and Gigli. Click-thru rates were compared for each site by randomly swapping banner ads on Braff’s myspace page for lastkissmovie.com along with the three placebo banners. Additional analysis was done to record the time spent and percent of site features visited for each site. Demographics from each visitor’s myspace page were collected in a massive database to use for comparison in the remainder of the study. RESULTS The gender of Braff’s myspace friends was the first factor studied. Exact figures are difficult to determine as approximately 12,000 new friends are added to Braff’s myspace page each day.[5] As expected, the majority of Braff’s myspace friends are female, but there was in interesting signal in the male contingent.
Next, the age of female myspace friends was studied. Appeal is cyclical across the range from 10 to 90 years old. An initial peak can be seen at 18, but as most girls go off to college and start having serious boyfriends, Braff’s appeal drops. There is a spike as women approach 30 and fear that they will never get married. For some unexplained reason, Braff is their ideal man. Braff gives a very strong showing with the soccer mom group in their early 40s and again with menopausal women in their late 50s. After that, Braff’s appeal drops with the exception of an 88-year-old African-American lady from Ponchatoula, La., but it was debated whether this data point should be thrown out as the woman is legally blind.
Further analysis of the pre-20 age group turned up the Paul McCartney Effect. Just as many teen girls in the ‘80s where unaware that Paul McCartney had ever been in a band called “The Beatles”, a significant portion of young girls are not aware that Zach Braff was in a movie way back in 2004 called “Garden State”. Board postings with offers of marriage are steady at 10,080 per week[6], but all of these are from a 14-year-old girl in Duluth Minn. who is currently hospitalized for sleep deprivation and has somehow still managed to generate 3,788 proposals after the study was complete and during the period in which she was hospitalized. Race of female myspace friends was investigated and showed Braff’s appeal is predominately with white females. A noticeable group of African-American and Hispanic females are myspace friends with Zach, but only so that can get an “in” with Donald Faison, again with the exception of the legally-blind African-American lady from Louisiana who is legally blind. No females of Asian descent are attracted to Braff due wholly to the racial epithet he was tricked into uttering in Season Three of “Scrubs.” Similarly, Braff has absolutely no appeal with lesbians on myspace as he has rebuffed their requests to post personal Web cam shows, along with lingerie photos. As for the male gay community Braff’s appeal is surprisingly limited to New Jersey gays, with occasional offers of “Zach, please join me in a civil union.” One-hundred percent want to make him their bitch and not the other way around. Also a gay polygamist sect in southern Utah has sent Zach 147 different offers to pair him up with husbands that range from 31 to 48 years his senior. Appeal to other faiths besides polygamist Mormons show essentially no difference among the groups with the exception of Asian-centric faiths and Jews.[7] Results were weighted to actual numbers of females in each faith for a given age group.
Hearing impaired people have absolutely no appeal for Braff due to their inability to hear the slight echo in his internal monologues. Thus, part of Braff’s appeal is not in the actual words he speaks, but in the delivery. To test the efficacy of Braff appeal, we had Lenny set up several placebo Web sites promoting Zach Braff in upcoming versions of Hook, Ishtar and Gigli as well as click-thru banners with Braff advertising Brussels sprouts and a five-percent discount for root canal work.
Multiple general linear modeling was performed with all r-values less than 1.0 and t-value probabilities greater than .38, indicating that there was no discernable difference in click thru-rates for banner ads, so long as Braff’s image was in the ad.
In fact, typical click-thru rates for banner ads range between three and five percent, whereas ads with Braff’s image have an astonishing 81% click-thru rate – limited only by server capacity at the destination site. This phenomenon was confirmed by placing two banner ads side by side: get a million dollars absolutely free with no strings attached and Zach Braff asking if he can bring his dog over to crap in your yard. As expected, there were no takers on the million dollars, but Zach could adopt every stray in southern California and still have a two-year backlog on dog poop requests.
Next, the research team studied Braff’s blogs and respondents posted comments and kudos ratings. The blog kudos rate remained unchanged whether talking about his dog, the new movie, the new movie soundtrack, a radio show on the indie station plugging the new movie soundtrack, toe jam[8], dust on his dashboard, a piece of gum stuck to a park bench, the lack of color fade of green paint on street signs, whether or not anyone ever uses those coupons on the back of grocery-store receipts and Zach’s experiment to see how long it takes to drain and replenish his refrigerator’s automatic icemaker on cold versus hot days.
To complete the study of the Braff effect, we analyzed music downloads from Braff’s myspace page. Average daily music download rates were statistically insignificant across the groups, which consisted of: the Last Kiss Soundtrack; the band KISS; Zanfir, the pan flute guy; Yanni; a three-fingered banjo player[9]; an Anita Bryant and Pat Boone duet from 1966; Paul Anka’s “She’s having my baby”[10]; Austrian yodeling’s greatest hits; Jackie Mason’s version of Minnie Ripperton’s “Loving you”; “Betty Davis Eyes” by Kim Carnes; the old “Leonard Nimoy Sings” album; and the latest by the Pyongyang Tone Deaf Singers.[11]
CONCLUSIONS Data throughout the analysis supported the hypothesis with the exception of disdain for Braff in the Asian and Jewish female cohorts. Cyclical attraction also exists across the age spectrum. In studying blog comments at zachbraff.com and myspace, we had the opportunity to validate his claim that he tries to read all comments. Of 7,644 comments posted to his blogs during the study period, IP address tracking confirms that he has read 18. “I’ve been touring to promote the movie,” Braff responded when shown the data. “I promise I’ll catch up on everything when I get back home.” REFERENCES[12]
___________________________________________________________________________ [1] We were never sure if the “click” was a word or if it meant the respondent was clicking their mouse. [2] Many of the fired researchers tried to reapply under assumed names. [3] Even our female turtle office mascot nuzzled up to the computer screen whenever we played the “Last Kiss” trailer. [4] He lost his girlfriend of 18 months once Braff started up his myspace page. [5] He passed up that Tom guy for most number of myspace friends in the first week. [6] This equates to exactly one per minute. [7] For some strange reason, Jewish girls just don’t seem to find Braff appealing. [8] This actually received slightly higher response from the myspace foot fetish group [9] That’s total for both hands. [10] Which unfortunately went double-platinum as a result of this experiment. [11] An Asian knock off of the New Christy Minstrels [12] The list was truncated to save trees and disk space. The actual list was nearly 3 million. |
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