Skip to main content

How The Internet Serves as Free Advertising

  My mom has recently developed a habit of sending me pictures of all the memes featuring "Baby Yoda" from the Disney+ series The Mandalorian whenever she finds them. While I enjoy looking at the memes, a part of me thinks about how they are essentially serving as free advertising for the show. The modern Internet culture that has developed around short-form entertainment like memes and video clips has served as a tool for media to spread from person to person more easily than ever before. Ultimately, the corporations that produce this media are able to get increased sales based on advertising that they never paid a cent for.

  While "word of mouth" advertising has always played a role in getting people to consume movies, TV shows, and other forms of media, the Internet has taken this concept and brought it to a new level. In a world where anyone can communicate with everyone else on the planet whenever they want to, discussion of popular new media can grow far bigger than it could with face-to-face communication. This is because people with common interests can find each other online much more easily than they could in real life. Ultimately, this has led to the increased growth of "fanbases" surrounding various forms of media. People's natural tendency to want to belong makes them more likely to want to join these fanbases, which essentially serves as a form of advertising.
  However, this concept of advertising can spread farther than just close-knit fanbases. As discussed earlier, the rise of memes has made clips and images from various forms of media reach mainstream audiences with relative ease. Memes are even made from scenes from trailers before a movie's release, further highlighting the connection between memes and advertising. The Internet's culture has made sharing images of scenes from movies or TV widely accepted as long as they are put in a "funny" context. The ultimate consequence of the Internet is that we are becoming advertisers without companies telling us to, meaning that they have more influence over our lives and our thoughts than ever before.

Comments

  1. Larissa Y.January 12, 2020 at 2:04 PM

    Hey Jackson! I never thought about memes as free advertising, but now that you bring it up, I totally see what you mean. I mean, everyone looks at memes, so as you said, this "free type of advertising" really reaches a lot of people. What's even better is how it's free for companies and brands! I feel like meme advertising mainly applies to movies and TV shows though, as the funny character reactions and faces can make great memes.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Avatar: The Danger of a Surface-Level Allegory

  When I first finished watching the movie Avatar , my first reaction was that while it was a good movie overall, I felt somewhat unsatisfied by it. It certainly excelled in some areas, like its visual effects, but at the end of the day, it did not resonate with me as much I expected it to. While I at first expected my cynical feelings toward it to decrease with time, I eventually figured out the real flaw I had subconsciously found in the movie. Avatar  is a movie that tries too hard to be an allegory for real-world issues without putting any thought or creativity into the way those issues were portrayed.   The overall message of Avatar  is that colonialism is harmful, and the symbolism throughout is nearly inescapable. For instance, the alien race being exploited for their resources takes clear inspiration from portrayals of Native Americans in both their design and overall ideology, and most of the villains' monologues sound like they are reading an excerpt from...
2 comments
Read more

How to Break the Cycle of Objectification in Advertising

  Before writing this article, I decided to try out an experiment. I planned on going through all my "recommended" articles on Google and counting how many I went through before I saw some sort of advertising objectifying women. Sadly, the results were even worse than I expected. The very first article I clicked on had explicit advertisements of women, despite the fact that the article had nothing to do with the ad in question and the fact that I always click "Not interested" and "Stop showing me this ad" whenever I come across this kind of ad on the Internet. Ultimately, no matter how hard someone tries to escape this type of objectification in media, it will always be prevalent in the modern era.   As addressed in the documentary Miss Representation , companies' objectification of women in advertising leads to both men and women treating women like objects and giving them impossibly high physical standards, increasing the already high amount of sexi...
2 comments
Read more

Datamining in my Everyday Life

  Whenever I was browsing YouTube or Instagram, I always found it odd that it seemed like many of the ads shown appealed directly to my personal interests. While there have always been ads that completely do not apply to my interests at all, a majority of them have at least one aspect of them that seems to connect directly to the types of things I personally enjoy (especially those I searched about online). I did not think too closely about these ads until I watched the film "The Persuaders" and realized that I was most likely a victim of datamining.   The advertisements I receive online all have extremely obvious correlations to the things I search for. I frequently see ads for video games and movies online because those are the types of things I tend to watch videos and read articles about the most. Moreover, the ads I get typically tend to be from companies that I read about more frequently, like Disney and Nintendo. As a result, it is clear that companies are aware of my...
2 comments
Read more