Once you have a full day's worth of advertising logged, write your response to this exercise as your blog post. As always: 350 words, using vocabulary and concepts from class, properly written as a coherent argument with college-level spelling and grammar. This is due March 26th for my MW students and March 27th for my TTH students.
One of the first things I noticed when looking at my Ad Journal as a whole was the beginnings of new methods being used to reach people. Primarily technology is the vehicle for getting ads to people, so when I encountered mostly cell phone related ads I really wasn't surprised.
I felt that this made sense because this is the cell companies attempt to reach people even farther then they do with billboards or television commercials, ECT. I expect that as this method of using smart phones to promote advertising so will the audience’s inability to escape ads since most people will always be carrying them, at least until some new technology is invented to top even this method of reaching deeper into someone's life.
The most prominent cell carrier that I encountered would be Verizon, which makes sense since they are one of the largest cell phones companies. I found it interesting that I didn't encounter any ads for AT&T because I was under the impression that they were competing with Verizon. Instead I watched and read Sprint ads. I actually thought that Sprint was dying out, either that or being bought by Verizon or AT&T, but whoever is working in their ad department is doing a good job while AT&T is asleep at the wheel. One thing I noticed about the Verizon ads was that I mostly encountered the same one advertising their LG smart phone on the 4G network. The same ad was repeated so many times that perhaps this repetition is a methodology itself to get the product to have more staying power in the audience's mind. One ad constantly repeated may have more power than many different ads.
After seeing the same ad over and over again I decided to take a different approach. I played with my Hulu account for a while watching some TV shows while clicking "yes" and "no" to the advertisements they play. This is the first system that tries to morph itself to things that are relevant to you. At first it played some ads for children’s toys and medicine, but that quickly changed to ads for cars: primarily for Jaguar and Chevy. The system stayed pretty constant with the car ads from that point and seldom deviated except sometimes for credit cards and an ad for Expedia which I guess could be associated with cars/trucks, and could also be viewed as another lure to snag my attention beyond what they have already.
As an after thought, I question how other forms of media will adapt as advertisement on this level of exhibition as this type of advertising becomes more main stream. I'm reminded of the phrase, one of Hanson's truths, "the fridge moves towards the center", and while he may be speaking of audience popularity I feel that the popularity of this method of advertising will become a popular method to reach the audience. Yet I also think about how other forms of media will have to adapt as this form of advertising becomes more widely utilized by the general public, and wonder if this question of commercial adaptation will be similar to how the news paper is struggling to adapt to the existence of the web journalism.
