Effects of New Forms of Advertising

New media advertisers like DoubleClick that collect and distribute personal data from users to outside organizations must have comprehensive privacy policies.

Check theirs out:

http://www.doubleclick.com/privacy/index.aspx

As Cass Sunstein would argue in his “The Daily Me,” from "Republic 2.0," that the customization of media technologies has led not only to audience fragmentation, but to a general limited awareness of the media world. As users can limit themselves to the news, blogs, and points of view they prefer, they need not run into any potentially opposing viewpoints or alternative attitudes. As a result, beliefs are reinforced and divergent thoughts are stunted: “when the power to filter is unlimited, people can decide, in advance and with perfect accuracy, what they will and will not encounter.” Sunstein would argue that people should be exposed to unintended material and that common culture and shared experience are crucial for society.

Though it would be impossible not to filter culture to some extent, Sunstein laments the fragmentation that has resulted from culture customization. He argues that “there are serious dangers in a system in which individuals bypass general-interest intermediaries and restrict themselves to opinions and topics of their own choosing,” and recommend that consumers not limit their intake of media to premeditated views and subject areas. His wishes may not be answered, however, as developing technologies only make it easier to access the content we want and avoid the rest.

This article in Wired Magazine takes into consideration some of Sunstein's points, reflecting that while new media advertisers have the ability to customize ads to better target consumers, such personalization lessens the opportunity for content that may challenge our existing beliefs.

In their “Advertising in the Age of Accelerated Meaning”, Goldman and Papson discuss the deciphering of advertisements as an inadvertent and almost absentminded process. They argue that most of the fun is in understanding each ad as a medium through which to tell a story. When watching a commercial, for instance, viewers “rarely pause to consider the assumptions imposed by the advertising framework” as they are far too busy trying to decode the message. Essentially, we are distracted by our inability to simply view a message for its component parts – we fail to recognize the underlying tactics and techniques as we focus our attention on “solving the particular riddle of each ad as it passes before us on the screen.” It is only those ads that excite the viewer (apart from his efforts to decipher) that have any real commercial potential. By tailoring ads to fit the individual media consumer, advertisers have a chance at making a profit. Thus, advertising relies on what Goldman and Papson refer to as “commodity signs”: attaching brand names to images with social or cultural value. When such values are familiar and appeal to viewers of an advertisement, they attend to it further and are more likely to remember a product. By knowing what the individual consumer is looking for, advertisers can be more successful in their tactics. It is this technique, in combination with new forms of media advertising including transmedia storytelling and integrated marketing that makes advertising effective.


Goldman, R., & Papson, S. (2000). Advertising in the age of accelerated marketing. In J. Schor & D. Holt (Eds.), The Consumer Society Reader (pp. 3-19). New York: The New Press.

As discussed in Adordno and Horkheimer’s “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception” (The Consumer Society Reader, 2000), the culture industry is an entity so extensive as to warrant the need for the repetition and reproduction. Because the industry is so far-reaching, the dissemination of media products requires meticulous planning and industrial organization. As technology has advanced and research has been done concerning consumer preferences and practices, the variety and sheer amount of advertising has increased exponentially.

Integrated marketing, for instance, has allowed for the customization of media content to meet the needs of individual users. Putting the same media into different formats, users can consume content in the way they choose and media caters to individual experience. Audiences have become fragmented as a result of this customization, creating change in the media community: people attend only to media targeted specifically to them. Transmedia storytelling is another technique used for getting the message heard. Rather than relying on only one mode of transferring a message, producers make use of multiple media in attempts to express media content. This method does, however, have the potential for overkill.

As a result of the proliferation of new media content, people have become almost immune to the process of consuming culture: “so completely is it subject to the law of exchange that it is no longer exchanged; it is so blindly consumed in use that it can no longer be used. Therefore it amalgamates with advertising… Advertising is its elixir of life.” Because the innumerable products of the culture industry have become little more than visual distraction, the industry has required advertising to revive itself. It is the excitement and novelty of ads that attracts viewer attention, supports the culture industry and makes sales. The key to advertising success is getting noticed. Regardless of the fact that consumers can see through the advertisements they are presented with, they continue to buy the products being advertised. The question of advertising success still remains, however; how to advertisements break through the clutter?


Adorno, T.W., & Horkheimer, M. (2000). The culture industry: Enlightenment as mass deception. In J. Schor & D. Holt (Eds.), The Consumer Society Reader (pp. 3-19). New York: The New Press.

Transmedia storytelling, as described by Henry Jenkins, is the conveyance of media messages across various media channels, allowing for more points of entry for the consumer to become involved in the message (Jenkins, 2007). Jenkins describes how a movie like the Matrix can benefit from transmedia storytelling as publicity for the franchise is created through using various channels of communication to spread the media message. Mark Deuze (2007) describes this use of transmedia storytelling as a deliberate attempt by media conglomerates to extend their franchises, explaining that convergence culture allows for large corporations to “seek new ways to intensify customer relationships, and cultivate consumer loyalties by captivating people’s media use across multiple platforms at the same time.” By increasing the number of platforms through which people can create and consume their media, corporate conglomerates aim for more intense consumer loyalty and usage. As media conglomerates integrate horizontally, they enable themselves to extend their brands- be it a movie or television show- over the various media channels which the companies themselves own. This enables such companies to strengthen their social influence in our mediated environment.

Deuze, M. (2007). Media work. Polity Books.

Jenkins, H. (2007). Transmedia storytelling 101. Retrieved March 4, 2008, from http://henryjenkins.org/2007/03/transmedia_storytelling_101.html#more

These communities are build as the consumer is met with a media message that resonates with their personal values and beliefs, allows them to feel like the message is also reaching people similar to them and helps them identify their place in society. Turow gives the analogy of a gated community; in this new media environment, advertisers are literally creating communities of similar interests and lifestyles and gated them off from one another. While this practice may make niche markets feel more secure and comfortable, it is also greatly fragmenting contemporary American culture, affecting the way consumers relate to one another in a new media environment.