You Are About to Poke The CIA.
Today, online communities provide an effective means to disseminate a message to not only a very large group of people, but also a targeted demographic. Popular communities such as Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube are the dominant groups boasting millions of active registered users each (14 million was the most recent count on Facebook). While organizations have realized the importance of advertising to these communities, there has been a lot of discussion on privacy—more notably with companies looking up potential new employees before hiring them.
An article by Wired News (January, 2007) talks about the Central Intelligence Agency having a Facebook page in the hopes of finding some new college-aged applicants.
Since Facebook has recently opened its doors to anyone with a computer (opposed to its original purpose of only allowing college students with a valid, and verified, college e-mail address) it has also opened the doors to hundreds of thousands of registrants protesting the “New” Facebook (which also includes RSS feeds that announce different activity on your page). Included in this protest were groups that called for a ban on Facebook advertisers.
Are online community users susceptible to these organizations and ads? Do the organizations lose credibility? Does it shed a new light to the targeted demographics? Or does it just add to the clutter as regular users go about their personal business on these sites?
January 31st, 2007 at 6:51 pm
Luke, you ask a lot of good questions.
Where the new order will shake out is anyone’s guess. But for decades the formula has usually been pretty simple. Somebody’s got to pay for any medium. Without advertisers bringing money to the party The New York Times would cost, what? $30 per issue? If members want an ad free environment in some of these new cyber places, maybe they would ante up for a premium membership.
Of course, this has long been an opportunity for advertisers; create something that actually adds to the value of the medium, not just adding to the clutter, and everybody wins.
January 31st, 2007 at 7:16 pm
Good point, but—ignoring product placement—it seems consumers accept that they are paying for advertising. Certainly by paying for a service, one would hope that the content itself would be of higher caliber, but does the consumer expect ads to be eliminated completely? Personally, I feel that just because I am paying a premium doesn’t mean that I won’t be subject to the same advertising. This can be found within a lot of media, including—more recently—having to pay $10 to see commercials before the previews BEFORE a movie; granted we are able to choose to come into the movie late to bypass the commercials, but with advanced technology we don’t have that choice. Take DVDs. How many times have we been forced, by the technology, to sit through commercials on a DVD (that cost us $15 - $30) before even getting to the DVD’s menu to press “start movie?”
The same could be said for The New York Times’ “Super-Premium” edition. I believe that if we did subscribe, at $30 per issue, that we would still have advertisements (granted, NYT would charge the advertisers in the “Super-Premium” edition a lot more).
With that said, is this pushing new forms of advertising, or even bringing product placement to a new level? In Interactivity In Advertising I mention how smart advertisers are working with the medium to offer consumer-driven information to those willing to accept it (prime example being GM’s TiVo commercial where the viewer is able to “learn more” if they want to, and are not forced to). Is the technology driving a new category of advertising?