🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <MPG.10b452b1aecedf1e9896be@news1.lig.bellsouth.net>,
hymie@bellsouth.net (Mikail J. Hymowitz) wrote:

> More importantly, particularly for the "big guy" companies, the banner 
> ads primary focus is not to sell something. It's to create name 
> recognition. [snip] Most viewers seem to prefer viewing Budweiser's 
> Clydesdales clomping through snow....

   Pretty lucid overview of how-it-works, Mikhail, except that the giant
horses have been pretty much replaced with frogs and lizards in the last
couple of years, despite the obvious links with pissing like a big horse
in the snow that just *says* "beer drinker" for so many people. I think it
may be that advertisers are now selling directly to the Reptile Brain,
which is much more ancient and easier to tap into with semiotic tricks and
memes and all that subliminal stuff that The Public knows nothing about;
the Mammal Brain is still reserved for the sitcoms they throw us, possibly
because lizards just don't connect with Chandler and Monica, or what's
about to happen between Kerri and Carter on ER. (I think about this on a
fairly regular basis and fairly intensively. As an old Media Whore I
monitor not only the location of the streetlamps we loiter beneath as we
wait for the next trick, but the color temp of the light that plays upon
our cheap sequinned gowns; at some point these considerations resemble
real Science.)
> 
> It's a new media for advertisers. Compared to the *years* it took radio-
> turned-TV advertisers to switch from "radios ads with pictures" to ads 
> that relied heavily on the visual element, the net advertisers are 
> catching on quite quickly. The big search engines all target their ads 
> based upon the context of your searches. Other big information sources, 
> such as computershopper.com, also target ads based upon the article 
> you're reading or program you're searching for. It works. It works well, 
> or they wouldn't be doing it.

   A friend of mine keeps asking about the proliferation of these
10-10-321 phone ads being shilled by George "I'd Never Sell My Street
Cred" Carlin and James Garner and all the rest of them -- "Don't the
advertisers know how stupid these things are? How *angry* they make us to
see these icons selling out for ad bucks when they should be acting for a
living?"
   And I point out that a BILLION $ INDUSTRY like long distance sales only
needs ten lousy percent of the pot and some upstart company out there in a
faceless stripmall in Iowa suddenly has a HUNDRED MILLION DOLLARS to play
with. They may not have even exxisted a month ago and now they're a major
player in the industry. You wave serious money under someone's nose like
that and Sir Laurence Olivier will sell you a pastel-colored Polaroid
camera. As they say on "Millenium" -- "This is who we are."

> Expect it to get better. Opinions vary 
> widely as to when it will happen, but many in the field believe on-line 
> ads to be earning more than traditional print media ads within the next 
> five to ten years. Bane or boon to the consumer, on-line ads are here to 
> stay. Expect to have ads targeted at you based on the contents of your 
> cookie files within the next year. [snip]
> 
> michael

   Hardison