Life in Ads

One could argue that social media is just a full on compilation of advertisements. Yes even the posts that you and your friends innocently share with your social circles of friends, family, and others could be considered advertisements. We are constantly scrolling through all this scattered information about endless topics that don’t even always pertain to our everyday lives. We’re subjecting ourselves to the wills of others, giving our attention to things that, I would argue, a majority of the time we don’t even care about. All these posts that we scroll past are vying for our attention and time. Classic advertisements especially have a need for us to stop and observe their messages because that is of course their whole purpose in life. But even posts from your friends and family are doing the same. They are asking for your likes and comments and attention. They are pushing out parts of their lives to us and what they think life should be like. They are essentially advertising what their versions of life should look like.

I myself am not so much of a Facebook person, but I can see the appearance of advertisements perhaps even more so when I do peruse my feed. I am on Instagram much more than Facebook and can definitely see the correlation. When I'm scrolling through my feed on Instagram, I see advertisements every few posts. The things I look up or even look at on Instagram always show up more than any other and I can say that this does make me more likely to click on or look at the advertisements. I think social media has done wonders for making advertising easier for people, but it has also made it a bit more difficult in some instances. It is quite helpful because it costs nothing to own an Instagram or a Facebook or a Twitter on which you can advertise your business to your heart's content. It created a new way to reach customers instantly and cost minimally. The only issue with this is that people are not always paying attention. Scrolling through your social media feeds is not exactly a highly cognitive activity. People scroll and scroll perhaps even barely paying attention to what’s in front of them. They don’t have time in the day for all these individual posts so why would they stop the constant flow of post traffic to cross the street and look at an advertisement for a few moments. They may not even do this for people they know, let alone giving time to an ad that they aren’t even searching for.

Companies however have figured out how to streamline advertisements in a way that they are designed and placed for the individual. Instead of using mass marketing techniques like what is usually put out in a broad sense onto the internet, they have started to use more of a tailored response or micromarketing. This micromarketing is a way of tailoring an advertisement to a person so that they are more interested in the topic of discussion or product than other ads. Some people might be freaked out by the fact that companies can find out if you're interested in their products, but I don’t think it’s a bad thing that companies use our interests to create ads for us. It gives them a more direct way to get to the customers that will potentially buy their products and it gives the customers a more direct way to find what they want or are looking for. After all, if I have to look at ads, I'd rather be looking at advertisements for things that I don’t mind looking at such as fashion and cooking rather than things like trucks or magazine covers.

Dan Schawbel wrote an article that states that, “Only 1% of millennials surveyed said that a compelling advertisement would make them trust a brand more. Millennials believe that advertising is all spin and not authentic. That's why they use Tivo to skip commercials regularly and avoid banner advertisements on Facebook and various news websites” (Schawbel, 10 New Findings About The Millennial Consumer, 2015). With so many people choosing to skip commercials and bypass ads companies are needing to come up with more clever and, you could say, sneaky ways to grab people’s attention. One of the many examples of companies using creative ways of advertisement to keep customers engaged and coming back is suggested videos or suggested watching lists. Companies like Amazon Prime, YouTube, Netflix and other video watching platforms use the customers likes and interests and previous searches to their advantage by giving them easy access to more things just like it. This way they insure that customers will continue watching and paying for their services. This pulls from the same idea of gathering information from what your customers are searching for and what they are watching. In this case it’s more about advertising to the people you already have invested in your business, but it's a very effective way to do this.

Regarding this mistrust that millennials have developed for advertisements, companies have developed another much more effective way to reach this group of buyers. They have discovered that, “33% of them (millennials) trust blog reviews for their purchases” and that, “around 40% of people reported that they purchased a product online after seeing it used by an influencer on YouTube, Instagram, or Twitter” (Patel, How You Can Build A Powerful Influencer Marketing Strategy in 2019, 2019). This kind of advertising has become extremely popular and widespread. This type of sponsorship has created a whole new type of advertising. I can validate it by saying that I myself go first to review blogs and videos before I buy a product and I feel much more confident in the purchase after I do.

Citations:

Dan Schawbel, Forbes, Jan 20, 10 New Findings About The Millennial Consumer 2015https://www.forbes.com/sites/danschawbel/2015/01/20/10-new-findings-about-the-millennial-consumer/#48592b706c8f

Patel, Sujan, et al. “How You Can Build A Powerful Influencer Marketing Strategy in 2019.” The BigCommerce Blog, 9 Apr. 2019, www.bigcommerce.com/blog/influencer-marketing/.