Ad Adjustments

I think the idea of ads becoming a dying art is a valid one. Many of my classes have addressed this in different ways.

In my social psychology class, we just learned that studies show that ads have zero to minimal impact on whether we choose to buy a product. At best, the ads leave us with a sense of goodwill towards the company, but this doesn’t necessarily mean that they benefit from us monetarily.

In my Understanding Media course, we discussed how most online ads are skipped as quickly as possible and seen as a nuisance. However, we also discussed how if the advertisers were to cut these ads down to 5 seconds, people would get the full effect of the ad without having to skip it.

Basically, what these things mean is not that ads are useless and that the advertising world is dead, it just means that it needs to adapt. The structure of ads hasn’t really changed substantially since the start of television, although the content has.

Audience tastes and the television content itself has become unrecognizable since then, so the ads should be too. We also mentioned in class how many networks’ target audience for a show is very different than who is watching it.

This means that doing ads for a show for your nail polish when only middle aged men are tuning in, is a huge waste of your money.

Basically, ad companies need to stop following their formulas and start focusing on what the audiences themselves want.