Media and Advertising Consumption

Ally Lanasa
al887715@ohio.edu

As students studying journalism and public relations, we understand the need for advertising to finance media outlets and TV shows. However, we are not immune to the frustration of seeing pop-up ads while reading articles online or the constant ad breaks while trying to binge-watch a show on Hulu. People are tired of being sold to. As Emily Nussbaum writes in a 2015 article for The New Yorker, "Advertising is TV's original sin." At the core of TV is commercialism. Advertising controlled the length of programming in the early days of TV. Originally six minutes of ads were permitted per hour. Now, it has increased to about 14 minutes.

According to a 2014 article by The Guardian, an average child sees 16,000 commercials on TV a year. Advertising to children raises an ethical dilemma. One problem that arises from targeting children is training them to choose products associated with celebrities. The focus is less about the product's value. Children need to be taught how to be cynical and critical about the media messages they receive daily, but it is not realistic to rely solely on media literacy training.

It is also often hard to decipher whether product placement in TV shows is paid or not. One example Nussbaum mentions in The New Yorker article is how a character on "The Fosters" promoted the Kindle Paperwhite e-reader by name and listed its features.  There is good and bad integration. Good integration is subtler and by people we trust. Why do we feel we can trust certain celebrities more than others? How have they established a rapport with us?

Courtesy of Product Placement Blog

The lines are murkier when it comes to online advertising, especially Facebook advertising. On Facebook, the ads are integrated into the Facebook News Feed, appearing as "organic content," or posts from friends we are connected to on the social media site. Mobile phones have been the primary reason for this integration because there is only a single column of space. Thus, the organic content and the advertisements get blurred together. In the new ad system, Facebook made the ads a central feature in the News Feed on the mobile screen in response to the screen limitations. The ad system also tracks geographic locations, personal interests, characters, behavior and other information Facebook users share digitally. Facebook allows advertisers to serve pages into the News Feeds of people they are not connected with, targeting the interests of users it has collected through the users' activity on the social media platform. When the pages appear in the News Feed, users can react to them the same way they react to other posts.

Will the separation between advertisements and organic content become clearer? As media outlets transition to digital platforms, will media consumers continue to feel sold to due to online advertising? Will social media platforms adopt stricter advertising policies to avoid targeting children? Are Ad blockers the best solution to solving the issue of excessive and fraudulent advertisements? There is not a clear, ethical solution for the issues of untruthful advertising, and it is unclear what the future of advertising will be.