Advertising - 21st Century Style

Advertising is all around us. It has been a part of life ever since it came into existence. In the 21st century, especially, it has taken on a new medium: technology.

As I was looking up things to source in this post, on the bottom of my chrome window appeared a little advertisement for Hot Topic. Just a few days ago I opened an email from Hot Topic to few some merchandise. This has happened several times; I'll google something, or open an email, or click a link, and suddenly all the ads that I see on my sidebars is all about that one specific thing.

As we learned in class, this is because companies keep track of those types of things (google searches, emails opened, etc.) and use it in order to personalize ads that we would be more likely to be attracted to - like Madison & Vine Advertising.

As found here, Madison & Vine Advertising is described as “a term that has come to represent the merging of advertising and entertainment in an effort to break through the clutter and create new avenues for reaching consumers with more engaging messages."

The most prominent example of this that I can think of is product placement in movies, TV shows, etc. Nowadays, commercials are basically obsolete; we can easily record our favorite programs and zip through them. In order to "break through the clutter," to quote the documentary The Persuaders, the commercials and advertising companies were forced to be integrated into the programs themselves.

Sometimes this integration can be subtle, well-placed, and might actually work, like these.

Other times, they're honestly just quite shameless.

But when I think of product placement, the first thing that comes to mind is a movie we watched in Mr. Perry's class freshman year: The Truman Show, starring Jim Carrey. Here is a compilation of the major product placement spoofs in the movie. The major one, I think, is when Truman's wife is advertising the Mococoa drink, and he flips his lid; it is actually a major turning point in the movie, if I remember correctly.

I actually don't mind product placement so much; when it's good, I mean. If it's terrible, like the shameless ones linked above, then it just gets tedious and annoying and I'm likely to stop watching. But if a producer is able to do it slyly, sometimes I don't even notice that it's product placement at all (though I'm also just pretty oblivious, so that could be part of it as well).

More to report.
-M