Advertisements interrupting your Listening?

When listening to music on an, ever so popular, music-streaming site such as Spotify or Pandora, the advertisements sure can get irritating. Listeners have been working on trying to find ways around having to listen to the advertisements. While advertisers have come up with some creative ways to make sure that their audiences have no other choice but to listen to the advertisements. You cannot forget about the advertisement for the online streaming website itself, they have also founds ways to incorporate advertisement into most things these days to get the word out about their program and fast. If that isn’t well thought out strategy, on both ends, I do not know what is.

Spotify and Pandora both offer free options of their services. However there is a catch: Advertisement. Advertising is Pandora’s only catch but Spotify only allows 6 months of unlimited listening and after that you are limited to 10 hours a month with a cap of 5 plays per unique track. However, according to the Los Angeles Times, just as of yesterday March 29, 2012, Spotify just lifted their limits, for the American users ONLY. Instead of only having 6 months of unlimited listening, we as Americans have an unlimited amount of listening from now on or until the terms change again.

Advertisements are not seen as a favorable thing to most audiences. Pandora and Spotify are aware of this and use that to their advantage. They strategically offer other levels, listed below, of services for a monthly fee and by paying for that upgrade you are able to listen to commercial free music.

http://www.spotify.com/us/get-spotify/overview/ vs http://www.pandora.com/#/account/upgrade

Are you willing to shell out the money for advertisement free music? If not, you can either just live with the advertisements or you can try to follow along with one of the several YouTube clips that instruct you on how to change your settings to automatically mute the advertisements when they start to play. After talking to a couple of my friends who use Spotify, they all had not heard of this change of setting ability. Between their responses and my research it does not seem as if this is a trend that is catching on or will catch on in the future.

Something that did catch the attention of my friends and has caused some irritation is what is being explained in the clip below.

 Clever, very clever.

Adding a feature to their website which causes the advertisement to pause when the volume is adjusted or muted definitely forces their audience to listen to the advertisements in full. They are now playing in full, whether you listen or not is a different story.  

Spotify, itself, is trying to benefit from advertisements too and has partnered up with Facebook for some help. Now when a friend of yours is listening to music with Spotify it shows up your news feed as shown in this screen shot.

Another clever advertisement move? With the large amount of Facebook users, I think so!  

Advertise 'foursquare' style!

Updated: April 24,2012

When you hear the word foursquare what do you think of? Foursquare was a game that you played at recess with a ball, now what is it? Why and how is it becoming so well popular? And how is it beneficial? 

Lets start with what foursquare means now.  Watch the clip below, which does a great job informing you on the app.

Apple says, “Join the 15 million people who use foursquare to explore the world around them! Keep up with friends, discover what’s nearby, and save money at places you love.”

What a great idea, right? Companies are able to advertise by “word of apps” through the people who download the foursquare app on their phone. The people who download the app do it because they are able to get deals and coupons for the companies that are apart of the foursquare circle. The combination of coupons and being able to use GPS to pin point someone’s location is an effective one.

http://www.techinasia.com/foursquare-marketing-tips/

In 2010 alone foursquare had 6 million users, grew 3400% and had 381,576,300 individual users check-ins. Foursquare is still growing and making changes to the application to better suite their users. One of the new developments that recently came out is a “Foursquare for Business” page. Their goal is to make the site easier to navigate and also easier to create a new account.

So this application is off to a great start but one may wonder how money is made with this app.  

According to executive editor of Inc.com, Christine Lagorio, there are 3 main ways to earn money on foursquare:

1.) Love your Mayor and Encourage Loyalty- A mayor status is awarded to the person with the most single day check-ins within a 60 day period at one specific venue. This feature is driving people to be loyal to venues because it is common for the person with the mayor status to receive deals on the product of the place they are mayor of.

2.) Attract New Customer- Foursquare has many coupons, giveaways and one time offers for many venues. There also is a feature called 'specials nearby' where your phone uses your location to show you coupons, giveaways and one time offers to venues that are in close proximity of where you are currently. That draws people to your venue even if they were not planning on going there originally, which then leads to new customers and then possibly new loyal customers.

3. Market your Brand in a Fresh Way- Foursquare does not allow advertisements, but non-retail or industry-service companies are still able to utilize foursquare. Pepsi, for example, partnered with foursquare this past December to promote its “Refresh Everything” community-giving campaign. Every time someone in New York City earned a point on foursquare, Pepsi donated four cents to an inner-city youth camp. In one week Pepsi donated almost $10,000.

Advertising is getting quite creative in their tactics. I wonder what they will come up with next.

But in the mean time… want to play a game of foursquare?

Advertisement as my Career

Advertisement in a way fell into my lap while at North Dakota State University. Here is my story.

I came to pursuing a career in advertising in a round about way. I came to North Dakota State University with my degree declared as environmental design also known as architecture. I was set that I would earn my degree and become an architect. At about the half waypoint of my degree I decided I really did not want to be an architect anymore.

I found that I loved the visual aspect of my degree and wanted to direct my future path in that direction. I decided I wanted do work more as a graphic designer and when I think of what they do, the first thing to come to mind is someone who works with and creates advertisements. So I went and filled out the paperwork to declare my minor in public relations and advertising.

I am very happy that I made that decision and very excited to see where this combination of education will bring me in my future.

The job market that I am planning to enter when I finish school is the design side of advertisement.  This profession is very competitive. On the positive side, the job market, for advertising, is predicted to grow 13% from 2008 to 2013. Here are some additional facts about job availability.

-The highest paid graphic designers live in San Francisco and San Jose.

-The highest concentration of graphic designers is in New York City

-Presently there are over 200,000 individuals in this profession nationwide with 124,800 jobs expected to open in the next 10 years.

Below is a graph showing salaries seen within this profession.

The profession of advertisement is not only growing but also has seen a shift in how it is created and used due to the changes of our interaction with the Internet.

Misty Belardo, the Senior Project Manager at Barefoot Proximity in Cincinnati, Ohio described this trend as, “Gone are the days when we have to wait for information. People get their information fast and in real time. They are spending more and more time online. Advertisers and brands need to see that.”

If you are not aware of what the trends are in your market you are going to fall short. Change is a good thing, and happens a lot in the world of advertising, so you need to make sure to keep on top of what is happening at all times.

My dream is to use all my knowledge from all my schooling to create advertisements that are on the cutting edge. I know in order to do that I am going to have to adapt to the changes within the industry and be willing to work hard.

Watch out New York City, advertisement capital of the world, I will be there before you know it to make a big and positive presence in the ever-changing world of advertisement.  

Below is a clip that illustrates how the internet has changed advertising.