Big Stars Research Articles

How big stars are made

We know little about the formation of stars that are many times heavier than our Sun. A new model, which estimates how long massive stars take to form, could be tested with data from telescope arrays.

Sport Business in the Next Decade: A General Overview of Expected Trends

The purpose of this paper is to briefly look back at the sport industry in the 1990s and to make some predictions for the sport industry in the upcoming decade. The 1990s were particularly strong for the sport industry, exceeding the highly optimistic predictions made at the beginning of the decade (Rosner, 1989). However, the authors predict a general decline in the U.S. economy, which will certainly impact the sport industry. Because of a number of problems currently facing the sport industry, including increased competition, heavy debt, and poor relations with consumers, sport industry professionals will need to use some creative strategies in order to continue to thrive. Some of these strategies include taking advantage of new technology; exploiting the big events, rivalries, and stars; tapping new markets; improving targeting efforts; attempting to reconnect with traditional fans/consumers; using creative financing; cutting the budget more frequently; and increasing synergy.

Measuring the Impact of Sponsorship

Introduction Sponsors are increasingly concerned about what results they are getting for their sponsorship dollars. In the 1980s when sponsorship was the hot marketing tool, corporate involvement boomed. Properties came-a-callin' and companies were willing to answer that call. Accountability seemed less an issue than the chance for corporate chieftains to exercise their egos. The chance to sidle up to big name stars or to have one's company associated with a major cause or event, irrespective of the value of that alignment to the company, was often overpowering. As the 1990s draw to a close, the scenario has changed. Big money still chases sponsorships, but with a twist. The value of sponsorships is being called into question much more often than in the past. Every aspect of the marketing mix, from advertising to direct marketing to sales promotion to couponing is under intense scrutiny and sponsorship is no exception. In fact, sponsorships are under a particularly strong microscope. And no wonder. The cost of sponsorship can be staggering. Olympic sponsorship 20 years ago (prior to the Los Angeles games) could be had for $5 to 10 million. Today, rights fees fetch $40 million. World Cup sponsorship in 1996 was upwards of $35 million. Several years ago, Coca-Cola paid a whopping $250 million to be the official drink of the NFL. Obviously, many sponsorships are not played out on a nationwide or worldwide stage. Rights fees can be much more modest than the multi-million dollar asking prices described above. Nevertheless, marketing managers still have to justify their allocation of marketing dollars to sponsorship. The cry now heard in more and more corporations is: Just what are we getting out of these sponsorships, anyway? Marketing directors and even CEOs are being challenged to justify their forays into event marketing and to quantify the value of their sponsorships. So, how does one go about determining what a sponsorship is doing for a company? How does one determine whether or not a sponsorship is returning anything to the bottom line? It seems to us that one difficulty that event marketers have in trying to figure out just what their sponsorships are doing is that they are either unable or unwilling to find out the answer! In some instances, the feeling is that there is no real accurate gauge for determining success, especially if the sponsorship is pursued as a means of improving relationships or boosting employee morale. These seemingly soft criteria are considered by some in the field to be impossible to measure. Yet another reason for avoiding measures of effectiveness is fear! Some event marketers try to avoid solid measurement because they worry that the answer will not be to their liking (a phobia we in the advertising business also suffer from on occasion). They know in their guts that the sponsorship was beneficial, but avoid trying to quantify these feelings for fear of being proven wrong. Ironically, the slower we pursue measuring the value of sponsorship, the quicker we may hasten sponsorship's demise. If we do not provide fair and objective estimates of the effects of sponsorship, there may be less money available for sponsorship activities as marketing dollars are allocated elsewhere--perhaps to those areas of marketing that can demonstrate effectiveness. Evaluating a sponsorship is not usually straightforward. * There may be imperfect or even conflicting evidence as to what happened. * There may be a problem deciding what is the relationship between cause and effect. * Because other elements of the marketing mix may be active at the time of the sponsorship, isolating the effects of the sponsorship may be problematic. * Because one sponsorship may work differently from another there may be no all-purpose solution for measuring impact. Despite these problems, we should not give up. …

Vintage Years of the Theatre Guild, 1928-1939 by Roy S. Waldau (review)

Book Reviews • VINTAGE YEARS OF THE THEATRE GUILD, 1928-1939, by Roy S. Waldau. Cleveland and London: Case Western Reserve University Press, 1972. 519 pp. $12.95. This book by Roy S. Waldau is a careful, well-researched, and complete history of the Theatre Guild, beginning at the point where Walter Prichard Eaton's earlier work, The Theatre Guild: The First Ten Years, leaves off. Despite the earlier work, Waldau here devotes a full but concise chapter to the history of the period from 1917 to 1927, noting a number of important matters which are prerequisites to understanding the history of the Guild during the period from 1928 to 1939 upon which he focusses. Wa1dau, for example, notes in this early chapter that in 1917, perhaps for the first time in American history, the moment was appropriate for the founding of an enterprise such as the Guild. Waldau suggests that the increasing aesthetic awareness of Americans during the period immediately prior to World War I gave rise to the desire to found theatrical ensembles that would rival the accomplished work being done in Europe by such organizations as the Moscow Art Theatre, the Deutsches Theater, and the Abbey. Such groups as the Provincetown Playhouse, the Neighborhood Playhouse, and the Washington Squar:e Players comprised the first wave of art theatres, but it was not until the founding of the Theatre Guild, growing from the experiments of the Washington Square Players, that America had what might be considered its first true national theatre. Chapters Two through Twelve deal individually and in minute detail with each of the seasons of the so-called "vintage years" of the Guild. By 1928-1929, the first season upon which Waldau focusses, the Guild had become internationally famous for world premiere productions of such plays as Shaw's Heartbreak House, Back to Methuselah, and Saint Joan, in addition to producing artistically successful works by writers such as Kaiser, Claudel, Toller, Andreyev, Rice, and O'Neill. By 1928-1929 as well, the Guild had 207 208 BOOK REVIEWS moved from its more limited quarters in the Gar~ck Theatre (which seated only 550) to its own well-equipped building (which seated 930). Waldau suggests that despite the enlarged facilities, the new building was more of a financial drain upon the Guild's resources than it ought to have been. Another essentially detrimental factor which Waldau discusses during the period he covers was the increasing number of secondary travelling companies emanating from successful productions of the Guild in New York. Such travelling ensembles served generally to diminish the Guild's reservoir of talent in New York as well as to force the Guild to produce plays of more popular appeal for less theatrically sophisticated audiences. All of these factors, coupled with the advent of talking pictures, the problem of perhaps too large and unwieldy a Board of Managers, and the financial depression of the 1930s, forced the Guild to become less and less what its founders had originally envisioned - a theatre for the intellectual elite. By 1939 and after, the Guild was hardly to be distinguished from other commercial theatre enterprises. As Waldau states in one of two concluding chapters, this one titled "What Went Wrong? What Went Right?", the Guild's managers had allowed the organization "to drift slowly away from experimentation and artistic excitement that characterized its early days toward a more popular type of theatre which invariably must cater to mass tastes, employing all the paraphernalia of compromise: big stars, big productions, and the inevitable big budgets, with the expectations of big returns." Such, unfortunately, has been too often the story of the theatre in America. Artistic vision inevitably has had to compromise with financial necessity. Waldau's book on the Theatre Guild is an excellent one. Twenty-four full-page illustrations of important Guild productions complement the discussion. Waldau tells the story of the Guild's rise, flourishing, and eventual decline in intelligently scholarly but readable prose. ROBERT R. FINDLAY University of Kansas HENRIK IBSEN: THE DNIDED CONSCIOUSNESS, by Charles R. Lyons. Carbondale : Southern Illinois University Press, 1972. CATILINE'S DREAM. AN ESSAY ON IBSEN'S PLAYS, by James Hurt. Urbana: University of Illinois...

Henrik Ibsen: The Divided Consciousness by Charles R. Lyons, and: Catiline's Dream. An Essay on Ibsen's Plays by James Hurt, and: Ibsen: A Critical Study by John Northam (review)

208 BOOK REVIEWS moved from its more limited quarters in the Gar~ck Theatre (which seated only 550) to its own well-equipped building (which seated 930). Waldau suggests that despite the enlarged facilities, the new building was more of a financial drain upon the Guild's resources than it ought to have been. Another essentially detrimental factor which Waldau discusses during the period he covers was the increasing number of secondary travelling companies emanating from successful productions of the Guild in New York. Such travelling ensembles served generally to diminish the Guild's reservoir of talent in New York as well as to force the Guild to produce plays of more popular appeal for less theatrically sophisticated audiences. All of these factors, coupled with the advent of talking pictures, the problem of perhaps too large and unwieldy a Board of Managers, and the financial depression of the 1930s, forced the Guild to become less and less what its founders had originally envisioned - a theatre for the intellectual elite. By 1939 and after, the Guild was hardly to be distinguished from other commercial theatre enterprises. As Waldau states in one of two concluding chapters, this one titled "What Went Wrong? What Went Right?", the Guild's managers had allowed the organization "to drift slowly away from experimentation and artistic excitement that characterized its early days toward a more popular type of theatre which invariably must cater to mass tastes, employing all the paraphernalia of compromise: big stars, big productions, and the inevitable big budgets, with the expectations of big returns." Such, unfortunately, has been too often the story of the theatre in America. Artistic vision inevitably has had to compromise with financial necessity. Waldau's book on the Theatre Guild is an excellent one. Twenty-four full-page illustrations of important Guild productions complement the discussion. Waldau tells the story of the Guild's rise, flourishing, and eventual decline in intelligently scholarly but readable prose. ROBERT R. FINDLAY University of Kansas HENRIK IBSEN: THE DNIDED CONSCIOUSNESS, by Charles R. Lyons. Carbondale : Southern Illinois University Press, 1972. CATILINE'S DREAM. AN ESSAY ON IBSEN'S PLAYS, by James Hurt. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972,206 pp., $7.95. IBSEN: A CRITICAL STUDY, by John Northam. Cambridge University Press, 1973, 237 pp., $12.50 cloth, $5.95 paper. The most notable tendency in Ibsen criticism since the Second Great War has been the promotion of the poetic and symbolic dramas as his greatest achievements and concomitantly the preservation of the realistic problem plays by embalming them in myth and symbol. At least that is what has happened in the non-Communist countries. In East Germany the problem plays remain the focus of attention, while the late plays are still seen as William Archer saw them, as a falling off of Ibsen's powers. What the Communist critics interpret as Ibsen's flight from reality and a retreat to a BOOK REVIEWS 209 dangerous individualism is seen in the capitalistic countries as a search for eternal values. In the realistic plays truths are described as relative and short-lived. Believing in a world of change, the Communist critic is not appalled by the brevity of truth, but the non-Communist worries that unless truth is eternal, art will be brief. Charles Lyons in his Henrik Ibsen: The Divided Consciousness finds that Ibsen throughout his long career was concerned with this disparity between what the truth-seeking intellect makes of the world of time and change and what time and change make of the mind's eternal truths. Ibsen's heroes formulate for themselves patterns or images of life, which Lyons calls myths since they are meant to endure forever. But these myths are crumpled and crushed by the pressure of ineluctable reality. This may sound at first like Pirandello at work on Ibsen, yet it is no more than a recasting in fashionable twentieth-century language of Ibsen's own interpretation of his works. He said he was always dealing with the conflict between one's aspirations and one's capabilities, between ideals and reality. It tells us something about the progress of Western thought that words like aspirations and ideals have...