Advertising: New ways to reach your audience

One of the areas we didn’t talk about was the internet in advertising. The internet is changing the way advertising is done. Go to Honda’s UK site to see the advertising there. They have a game called Rabbit Grrr in which you hop around eating carrots and hitting out-of-date objects for points. Is there advertising in the game? Not directly. But it gets people to visit the sight. Oh, and the out-of-date object are a sort of play on the idea that they are selling their environmentally friendly, new technologically hip hybrid vehicles. People are using the web to advertise themselves as well. A French student posted his resume on line as an animated music video. Yep, he got the job at Microsoft.

As others have said, I too feel an ambivalence toward advertising. Isn’t that true when we feel pulled apart by what our culture values and yet our Bible tell us what to value and the church has told us what that must look like. It makes me think of those Christian t-shirts with all the fish swimming in one direction and then that one fish going the opposite direction. It reads, “Going against the flow” or something to that effect.

One of my concentrations in my business degree was marketing. Also, I worked in marketing research for 2 years. This has given me a bit of an inside perspective of advertising. In many ways I value marketing but for the same reasons I feel cynical towards it. The goal is to figure out what the customer wants and to communicate the product not only to meet those needs by to exceed them, perhaps in ways not yet thought of by the customer. I guess the part that makes me the most cynical is that I feel it is solely to sell a product and not to meet a customer’s needs. But then again, what is wrong with that?