technological Trends in advertising and Media
"In the digital era, news has become omnipresent. Americans now are able to access it in multiple formats on multiple platforms on a myriad of today's latest devices. The overwhelming majority of Americans (92%) use multiple platforms to access the news events on any given day. However, the internet is at the center for telling this story on how people's relationships to news is changing. Six in 10 Americans, (59%) get news from a combination of online and offline sources in a given day, and the internet is now the third most popular news platform behind local and national television news" (PEWRESEARCH). "And to a great extent, people's experience of news, especially on the internet is becoming a shared social experience as people swap emails, blogs, and post and highlight news stories on their social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. Some 28% of internet users have customized their home page profiles to include news from their favorite source or topics" (PEWRESEARCH).
This is precisely the reason why advertisements done exclusively on the web are becoming such popular marketing tools for a wide array of businesses today. The Internet is only third in popularity for use among Americans as well as people from other countries. People can now access on a consistent daily basis, the news that is most important to them, news that revolves around a various person's interests, such as music, film, sports, or other form of entertainment, and purchasing opportunities through advertisements, specific as well to a person's interests are placed on the Internet on individual social networking profiles like Facebook by different businesses and companies. It is becoming increasingly easy for companies to find their target markets for advertisement purposes because online social networking profiles of an individual are personalized exactly to a person's interests and hobbies. The Internet has the capability of storing such information, or the data of what sites a person has visited, for advertisers to benefit as a direct result of these profiles.
"United States advertisers spent an estimated $1.4 billion to place ads in social networking sites like Myspace and Facebook in 2008, and advertising expenditures were expected to rise to $2.6 billion in 2012, indicating the rising influence of these sites in modern society. Advertising has become so important to businesses because as these sites become more popular, the user base is expanding from teenagers to young adults to now including more people over the age of 50, and by March of 2009, one third Facebook's users worldwide, for example, were in the 35-49 age group, and more than a quarter were older than 50" (PROCON).
It is known by almost everyone now that online tools for advertising, including those from social networking sites like Facebook are becoming increasingly popular for people of all ages. Businesses and corporations of all types and specialties, large and small, those with either local or international influence, and even political parties are using some type of online technological advertising tool. Yellow Pages is example of a company that is now placing their advertisements for various companies primarily online, and this is seen to be just as effective for businesses as paper advertising has been. But we must ask, just because it is an online technology, does that mean these technologies are more effective, are necessarily a good thing for society, do they fairly represent people and their businesses, and are they actually turning advertising into a lower quality product? Are people losing their privacy as a result of the information gathered online by these companies and advertising moguls? These are questions we must critically analyze and then must be able to answer for the long term benefit of businesses and corporations alike, as well as culture, society, its individuals, and essentially the future and fortitude of capitalism and democracy.
This link to the following article shows the latest turnout for Facebook advertising as a medium used by many different businesses, and shows that Facebook being used for advertising purposes is not as effective as once believed and as once sold to the public:
http://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-facebook-advertising-growth-slowing-20120627,0,1037948.story
But why is this so? Google search results, as pointed out by Andrew Keen in the Cult of the Amateur by Michiko Kakutani, answer search queries not by what is most true but with what is most popular. In Keen's view, Web 2.0 is changing the cultural landscape and not for the better. By undermining mainstream media our news for example, is made up of primarily a hyperactive celebrity gossip on sites like YouTube, and then are served up as mere dressing for advertising. And as advertising dollars migrate from newspapers, magazines, and television news to the Web, organizations with the expertise to finance investigative and foreign reporting are increasingly faced with more and more business challenges. And as CD sales fall as a result of digital piracy and single-song downloads, the music business will become increasingly embattled, and new artists will understand that Internet Fame does not translate into the sort of sales and revenue and worldwide recognition as once experienced by earlier generations of musicians (Kakutani). "What one may not realize is that what is free is actually costing us a fortune in the long run. The real and only winners, Myspace, Facebook, Google, and YouTube are unlikely to fill the shoes of the very industries they are helping to undermine, in terms of products produced, jobs created, revenue generated, and benefits conferred" (Kakutani).
In other words, the so called democratization of the Internet through the use of social medias like Facebook, Google, and YouTube are actually bringing in less money for certain businesses than the more traditional forms of advertising, and are actually reinforcing and strengthening the ideals of neoliberal globalization that are becoming increasingly present around the world than ever before, much to the result of these ever popular online social medias. Through the filter of popular knowledge that associates democratic ideals and free thinking with free enterprise, global online activity enables the largest corporations in the world, which include those of social media sites like Facebook, to flourish as the only real winners in today's economy.
However, maybe the trend of social medias for advertising purposes, as the link to the article above shows, is diminishing due to a lack of effectiveness of the Internet as Andrew Keen has described above. In the long term, if the status quo is allowed to continue, the only real winners are a handful of the largest corporations in the world today, but once businesses see the inefficiencies of online advertising, the strength of these social medias and other corporations that benefit from online interaction may begin to soften, and individuals and then society as a whole may benefit as a result, and just might renew a sense of self and community.