Week 13 Part A: Online Advertising - Analysis of the Marketplace

 1. Look for examples of advertising or sponsored posts on FaceBook, Instagram, and other social media. What draws your attention? What is their call to action? Do they use imagery and is it effective? Which ads are annoying? If you click on their link what did it go to?

2. Compare the impact of traditional advertising (in newspapers, magazines, billboards, radio, TV, etc.) to advertising done on Social Media. Which seems more practical to you?

3. Some online advertising seems more similar to traditional advertising, not dialing into the individual consumer's tastes and search patterns. Where do you see this? Some become almost too dialed into what you have researched in the past. Does this feel intrusive at times? Or helpful? 

1. What typically draws my attention to ads on social media are the colors and the use of intellectual properties I am familiar with. Their calls to action are typically that they are on sale or they will sell out soon so you should go to the webpage and buy it now. They often use imagery of anime or superhero characters to draw my attention, and it works most of the time. The ads that are annoying are ones that have nothing to do with me or tailor to my personality, just generic brands with boring imagery and wording. Clicking on the link on Instagram usually opens up a tab on their webpage directly to a list of products.

2. Comparing traditional marketing and social media marketing is often like comparing apples to oranges. Due to how different they are, while Tv, magazines, and billboards will allow a big group of people to see you often in a large metropolitan area there is still a small number of people that will follow up on the message. Leaving your target audience often in the dark or missing out on your product or service. Online, however, you can exclusively tailor your ads and messages to people that you directly wish to target using tags and the options given by most websites. Even better, typically at a lower price than a huge billboard or Tv commercial.

3. While yes, tailoring your ads to the specific user is extremely helpful and can have a good turnout on whatever it is you providing. It can very well, get lost in the noise if it is too generic or equivalent to a quick tabloid on a magazine. On Instagram and Tiktok it is still very likely you will run across a majority of ads that don't have anything to do with you and are just attempting to sell a product you aren't interested in, but it is as well a double-edged sword. As we've seen the consequences from Facebook and Amazon of what it is like to be too in-tuned with their audience. Tracking personal data and generating ads and messages to specifically target an individual can very quickly go off the rails and have dire consequences in real-time. Often leading to the user feeling almost spied on by the companies for things that they are being told they will like.