My Thoughts on Advertising

Great advertising will always be successful. The classic Apple commercials that make us associate cool, hip music with iPods are the top. So are the Budweiser commercials featuring the clydesdales we love. These are the Super Bowl ads, the ones we talk about with our friends and coworkers. This form of advertising, however, is not limited to TV. Billboards, internet ads, radio, etc. can also be Super Bowl ads.

The second major factor in ads is matching ads with consumer. Some might say Google pioneered this with their AdSense technology, but ad-consumer matching has occurred since the beginning of advertising. Open any magazine and look at how focused the ads are to the topic of the magazine. Watch any TV show and you will see that the advertisers hand picked which shows to put their ads on. However, Facebook is advancing this idea further because they have a profile of each consumer. Because Facebook knows so much about the consumers, they can match ads perfectly.

Let's pause here for a second. You may say that this is awful because these advertisers are taking advantage of the consumers and shoving their faces with products they don't need. While this is true, these products might also be useful in their lives. If you don't like advertising, watch public TV.

The future: Ads will continue to become specialized and personalized. With most purchases occurring electronically, we'll get ads like "So you bought XY Product. Now you need XZ." The bottom line is that ads must be important in some way to the viewer in order to be effective.

However, there is another slant to this. As pointed out to me by Dr. Diana Blaine everything we consume is an advertisement. The news is an ad for the products that the stories are about. TV shows are ads for the products shown. Maybe life is just a huge advertisement that makes us keep getting out our wallets.

As for the ads on my site, hey, it pays.