- June 1, 2010
- Posted in Advertising
- No Comments Yet
Why are there Ads in Things We Pay For?
You think when you spend money and purchase something you shouldn’t have to see ads right? Isn’t that what HBO and Showtime taught us? The same principal seems to work around a web service as well. When you pay for a product, shouldn’t there be no ads? We don’t pay for Facebook, so there are ads. We do pay for eBay so there are no ads.
Keeping your product free of ads seems like just a basic principle of business, but once you look a little closer it seems like this is where hidden advertising comes into play.
“Creativity is truly a key to successful ads”
Let’s take HBO for example… you pay for their service and you don’t see any commercials. So how do they fill time between their movies and TV shows? They have their own in house commercials promoting new movies and TV shows that they have. These are ads! We as consumers don’t really look at them as ads because they’re not all that bothersome, but nevertheless they’re promoting something so I would call them advertisements.
I guess the only logical answer for why there are ads in things we pay for is because companies want to make money. If there is some sort of promotion they can run on the side of a soda can that could get them more visitors to their website, they’ll do it.
To me, some of the best ads are advertisements that we don’t even recognize as traditional ads. Creativity is truly a key to successful ads and promotions.