Week 11 – Use of ads

Online social media sites are now the new battleground of advertisement’s. You can’t go more than two scrolls through your news feed without seeing and ad creepily tailored to your likes and profile information. Although creepy and invasive, ads through social media really work well. So well in fact, that we are learning about it in this class for use for our own (fictitious) business.

Designing an ad

Designing an ad takes a little more than Photoshop and a few hours. What you say, how you position it, even down to how you color it, all have factors in how people perceive it and if they want to interact with it. The book focuses on some principles of design, however I want to address some factors that are more on the ground level and from practical experience (to give you a break from rereading all the regurgitated language from the text book that most students copied for the assignment) Be Obvious – The message needs to be straightforward. When someone looks at the ad, they need to understand right away what you are trying to convey.

Be Simple – Anything that takes them longer than 2 seconds to decipher will confuse and keep people away. This is social media, where attention span lasts shorter than a four year old on Christmas morning.

Capture attention – There needs to be content in the add that appeals to your target market. For example, if you are a beer company, your target market is man between the ages of 21 and 30. 

Therefore, a beautiful woman drinking a beer is the stopping power you need. Selling baby food? Put a baby playing with a puppy and you’ll have women snap too for the ad. Cheating? Yes, but it works and people do it often.
 

Use of Banner Ads

Banner ads online and in social media are tricky. Facebook is the main area where banner ads are being utilize to gain attention of a target audience. The reason why banner ads are so useful on this platform is because of the information Facebook has about each of its users. Want to target men who like foot ball, drink beer, and sit around playing video games all day? No problem. Facebook knows when they drink, what teams they follow, and what their favorite weapon is in Call of Duty. That kind of detail offers marketers creating ads a very fine way to target someone. And you can do the same thing if you want to.

Twitter Advertising

Twitter is another way to get your message out to a large and attention deficit audience. However, the ads end up showing in the news feed rather than on the side like Facebook. This is also less of image advertising and more script (under 140 characters). The potential to reach a large audience quickly on this platform with ads is just as powerful. However, Facebook would be a more long term advertising route that Twitter. If you are going to advertise on Twitter, I would suggest you use this for a promotion or coupon that involves a quick call to action. This is a great way to boost traffic to a website or boost sales in the short run. Over a long period of time, it will not work based on how much information is pushed through Twitter.

 

Ads for my business 

During the course of this class, my business is taking a different direction. I will be rebranding the company a book publishing company to that of an eBook distributor. With that in mind, I am going to employ a different marketing strategy than most would when it comes to using social media.

 I know the assignment it to come up with an ad and post a screen shot, but I’m not going to do it. Unless you have a large budget with a team to develop an effective advertisement, the work and monetary allocation will not equal the amount of interaction and conversion that you might need, especially as a start up company with a limited budget.

 Go ahead instructors; hit me with a few points lost. I’m not going through the motions of creating an advertisement that I am not going to use.

 To counter the homework, instead of explaining why ads are effective, I am going to explain why they are no longer affective in the social media space. Keep your hands and arms inside the ride at all times kids; you’re about to learn something new.

 Ad space is incredible crowded – according to studies, people see around 5,000 advertisements a day. Everywhere you look, be that online or just walking down the street, you are bombarded by brands and commercials from every which way. People are becoming numb to it and seeking areas where they are not inundated by commercials. Marketers are fast to follow, but case in point there’s way to many that people just ignore.

Lack of trust – Consumers find banner ads online to be the least trusted form of advertising. Most of us grew up with false banner ads and pop ups that lead to sites that mostly likely have viruses, result in spam, or tricked the consumer into visiting the site that is not what they intended.

They’re incredibly expensive – I’ll bet after taking a look at what it might cost to run an ad to a large audience on Facebook, you’ll agree with me that its becoming rather expensive. With how these social media companies are growing in terms of users, the ad space will only become more and more expensive.
 

In conclusion

Go ahead and read my next post that will show you my tactics for getting the word out about your company over social media.