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Showing posts with label Advertising. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Advertising. Show all posts

Thursday, December 27, 2012

People as a product!

In digital space, users are increasingly being shaped as commodities by various sites and services.

LAST week, social photo-sharing application Instagram caused an uproar when it announced changes to its terms and conditions.

The changes were related to its advertising policy, and were interpreted by many people as the company reserving the right to share user information and pictures with advertisers (or to be used in advertising) without permission.

Instagram has since reversed that policy and apologised for the “confusing” language, stating: “Legal documents are easy to misinterpret.” (You can read its response at http://bit.ly/U79Nld.)

This seems to have pacified some users, but many are still fuming, while others have opted to try different photo-sharing apps as an alternative.

There are two primary issues with this. One is a privacy issue, in that the company would even consider sharing user information and pictures with its parent company Facebook and other third-party organisations (including advertisers).

The other is copyright; in the same response, Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom wrote: “Instagram users own their content and Instagram does not claim any ownership rights over your photos. Nothing about this has changed.”

Users had every right to be upset. These are serious issues with severe repercussions, and it is becoming more and more common that online sites and applications are usurping the rights and control of their users. Facebook’s constant changing of privacy settings is legendary. The deeper we embed ourselves within such social network sites, the more we seem to get walled in.

As the days wear on, we find it increasingly harder to escape – most of our connections are in our social network of choice, our memories are stored within our profiles, and we are relying on it to be our source of information.

In many cases, we have come to depend on it for almost all of our interactions – we no longer need to remember people’s birthdays, we can send messages to each other conveniently without the need to store addresses, and we can broadcast our lives to all our friends at the click of a mouse.

Whether or not the reliance on such technology is a good thing is a different debate, but the fact is that the services these sites provide – it doesn’t matter if we never needed them before – are extremely useful.

However, many users don’t realise that this is still a service. Such technology has become so embedded in our lives that many of us have taken it for granted.

The fact that it is also primarily operated on the Internet has contributed to this sense of entitlement. Why buy newspapers when you get the news online for free? How many of us still send text messages via SMS now that there is iMessage, Blackberry Messenger and WhatsApp? With Skype and Viber, who needs to make traditional phone calls?

In some cases, it is easy to see how the companies behind them are making money. Newspapers now provide news for free (some have paywalls) with the hope of driving more traffic to their sites, which are plastered with advertising.

Apple and RIM, the maker of the Blackberry, promote their messaging systems to encourage people to buy their devices. Skype has a premium service that users can pay for as well as cheaper computer-to-phone rates which helps supplement its income. In that sense, the products these companies offer are obvious.

Social network sites like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter also have a product: You and me.

What they essentially do is no different from the media outlets – they sell their user base to advertisers. Unlike the print and broadcast media, however, these sites tend to have more information on their users which can be sorted or mined to help advertisers reach their target market.

Each update we post on these sites contains more information about our lives and what interests us – whether it’s in the words we use, the places we check in from or the photos we upload. And they have a lot of information. Citing European policy law, a student from the University of Vienna made a request to Facebook to hand over all the information it had on him. And Facebook provided it – all 1,200 pages of it.

The point here isn’t about how scary it is that a company has so much information on each of us – this too is a different debate.

The concern is that as technology advances, we are increasingly being shaped to be a product, and this is an awareness we have to carry with us constantly. It is pertinent to note that this is not a new phenomenon – the whole basis of the advertising industry is based on consumers being the product.

This is why newspapers are able to subsidise publishing costs to sell their products at a relatively low price (or in some cases, offer it for free) and why we get to watch television for “free”. Or pay very little.

We need this awareness because it will help us make decisions about how we navigate our digital lives. It will also help us reclaim some of the control – and our rights.

Instagram may have reversed that new policy for now, but there’s no saying it won’t come back in another form. Facebook has gotten away for many years with changes that its users do not like because few people are willing to walk away from it.

This is not to suggest that what these companies are doing is right. But the adage that nothing is free rings true in this situation. There are alternatives but each comes with a price.

The alternatives to these sites – some of which are on open-source platforms – may not be as polished and lack the critical mass to be as effective as the big social sites. Then there are the commercial entities which charge you (Flickr, for example, is capitalising on a sudden exodus from Instagram to its platform, offering its paying customers an additional three months of service).

It is only by carrying this awareness with us always that we can truly make the right decision – whether to stick with these companies, or stick it to them.

ReWired By Niki Cheong

Niki has just completed his MA Digital Culture and Society at King’s College London. Connect with him at http://blog.nikicheong.com or on Twitter via @nikicheong. Suggest topics and issues on digital culture, or pose questions, via email or on Twitter using the #Star2reWired hashtag. 

Thursday, June 7, 2012

Sexy Advertising On the Rise


Magazine ads are becoming bolder.
CREDIT: StockLite, Shutterstock

Don't blush, but chances are the magazines you read are getting sexier.

Sexy advertisements are up in magazines from Playboy to Time and Newsweek to Esquire, according to new research from the University of Georgia. Since 1983, the percent of ads using sex to sell products rose from 15 percent to 27 percent by 2003.

Though sexual imagery is used to sell almost everything, even banking services, the bulk of the increase has come in ads for impulse buys: alcohol, entertainment, beauty supplies. These products have long clung to the "sex sells" maxim, said study researcher Tom Reichert, a professor of advertising and public relations at the University of Georgia.

"Advertisers use sex because it can be very effective," Reichert said in a statement. (Past research has suggested, however, that sex doesn't sell to female readers, with sensual advertising images leaving women bored and uninterested.)

Sex sells

Reichert and his colleagues analyzed 3,232 ads published between 1983 and 2003 in six magazines: Cosmopolitan, Redbook, Esquire, Playboy, Newsweek and Time. These magazines were chosen because they have large circulations, include titles that appeal to both men and women, and because they have been included in past studies, allowing for easy comparison across time.

About half of the advertisements included models. Researchers analyzed these ads based on how sexily the models were dressed and whether they were engaging in physical contact, such as kissing or simulated sex, with another model. [Sex Quix: Myths, Taboos & Bizarre Facts]

The ads for health and hygiene products were the sexiest of all ads, with 38 percent containing sexual imagery across the three-decade study period. Beauty came in second, at 36 percent. Drugs and medications, which include weight-loss supplements, came in third with 29 percent of ads containing sexy models.

Just more than a quarter, or 27 percent, of clothing ads showed sex appeal during the study period, compared with 23 percent of travel ads and 21 percent of entertainment ads.

The overall uptick in sexiness was driven by increasingly sex-obsessed ads for alcohol, entertainment and beauty products. In 1983, only 9 percent of alcohol ads used sex to sell booze. Today, that number stands at 37 percent. Sexually arousing entertainment ads increased from 10 percent in 1983 to 33 percent today, and 51 percent of beauty ads now include sexiness, compared with 23 percent in 1983.

Modeling sexuality

Women are overwhelmingly the vehicles by which advertisers portray sexuality, the researchers found. That trend has held for three decades. In 1983, 11 percent of all advertisements contained sexy women, and only 3 percent contained sexy men. As of 2003, 22 percent of ads included sexy ladies, while only 6 percent featured smoldering hunks.

Sexy images popped up in odd places, including in 5 percent of advertisements for financial products in 2003. But for the most part, advertisers use sex to sell products that people might buy on a whim, such as a new flavor of vodka or a papaya-scented lotion. Only two categories — charities and computer companies — never used sex in their ads in this sample.

"Sex is not as effective when selling high-risk, informational products such as banking services, appliances and utility trucks," Reichert said.

The researchers reported their results online in May in the Journal of Current Issues & Research in Advertising

By Stephanie Pappas, LiveScience Senior Writer
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Sunday, May 20, 2012

Facebook Seeks Political Ad Dollars


There’s certainly money in politics, and Facebook knows it. The company, now under pressure to to justify its enormous $104 billion IPO, is trying to hire someone to maximize political advertising sales during the 2012 election season in the U.S.
“The Client Partner will establish and strengthen key relationships with national political campaigns and organizations with a focus on driving revenue, platform adoption, advertiser education, and advertiser satisfaction,” the posting on Facebook's website says.
How much money is in politics for Facebook? That's hard to say. But with the rise of the Super PAC, campaign spending on advertising will likely reach record-breaking levels this year. A growing percentage of that is moving online, in part because fewer people are watching live TV than during previous election years, according to the global ad agency WPP. The Hill reports that the Obama campaign alone is on track to spend $35 million on total online advertising this year, up from $16 million in 2008.

Unlike other advertisers that have questioned the value of Facebook this week, both the Romney and Obama presidential campaigns are likely to appreciate Facebook's importance. It had 40 million U.S. users in 2008 compared with 160 million today—almost the entire American voting public, according to The Guardian.

So, yes, we’ll be seeing a lot more politics in and next to our News Feeds over the next few months, targeted based on our activity and our friends' activity on the network. Whether the lifting of corporate spending limits on political campaigns, a result of a Supreme Court decision in 2010, will actually be a meaningful boost Facebook’s bottom line this year is unknown. The company’s total advertising revenue worldwide was about $3 billion in 2011.

 Jessica Leber Newscribe : get free news in real time

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