SPE 212 Blog Post #4

I never realized how much advertising plays a role in our society until this blog post assignment. I imagined advertising took place on television during commercials and on the radio. Not realizing that advertising is practically everywhere we look. After my twenty-four hour advertising period was complete my list of ads was full. I saw ads I never even knew existed. I am more aware of advertising now than I ever was before. I see them everywhere since my advertising adventure began!

            The most unusual advertising tactic I saw was on a car. I never saw such an unusual advertising in my life. When I got home I researched it and came across more information. When you rent a car from places sometimes they have advertising on it. Also, some people get paid a few hundred dollars a month to drive around with an organizations ad on their car.

            The ad I disliked the most came from a television show. The Voice on the NBC network had one of their contestants drive to the competition in a Kia automobile. There was a 3-4 second pause, when the camera was directly looking at the Kia logo. The male contestant received a call from his daughter on the hand free phone device the Kia car company offers. Before this class I never would have even realized Kia was using advertising directly in the show. I found this ad to be frustrating. I thought it was extremely fake looking and didn’t make me want to purchase a Kia. Of course, this is just my opinion and maybe someone else watching the program found Kia to be appealing.  If I was the advertising agency who created this ad I would have made the ad more realistic looking and not so cheaply designed.

           

            The most obvious ad I found on my advertising journey was on T-shirts and other clothing materials. There are thousands of people on our campus every day. I never took notice of peoples shirts until now. I found advertising for food places like Subway and Wawa. There were a lot of construction and car towing shirts I saw people wearing as well. The most popular type of advertising on t-shirts and clothing I found were from stores. For example, the typical Hollister or Abercrombie shirt that has their brand name written on the shirt or sweatpants. I believe this is a very smart tactic used by the clothing companies. They already know people buy these clothing items so they know it will be a profit for them. Secondly, while there consumer is wearing their clothing items the company is getting free advertising.  Although, it is getting annoying to see everyone wearing the same type of clothing with the brand name written down the side of the shirt, it is a creative move on the company’s part.

I found the usual advertising while keeping my advertising diary. There are a few main ads I used to see before this assignment that I still see today. This includes ads on the side of your computer when browsing the web, in the newspaper, magazines, and on the sides of buses. These types of advertising have been around for years and will continue to stay. I believe that all the ads I saw, the new and old, all tried their best to catch my attention. Most were cleaver while some like the Kia ad made me want to change the channel.  I found that most advertising can be seen any time of day, depending on where you are and what you are doing. There are some ads that can only be found during the evening hours on television, like the Kia ad on The Voice. Watching television during the prime time hours is when I found the most popular and interesting commercials that did an excellent job advertising a product.

After this blog post assignment I see ads even more frequent then I did before. I am more aware of where advertising is located and how I truly feel about advertising. I believe the advertising world is in full effect and there will be more creative and catchy ads to come as the years go by.