The Advertising Amateur

As a student aspiring to work in advertising, learning must start somewhere and with something.

For me, my learning is starting this Sunday evening on my couch with the Super Bowl.

When I was younger, I remember gathering with family and friends for the Super Bowl, but since I wasn’t a football fan I’d only watch the commercials.

Today I planned to  kickstart my learning by immersing myself in an array of different commercials by “watching” the game. I don’t know much about football or the technicalities of everything advertising, but I can analyze this year’s advertisements and see how companies communicate and connect with their consumers.

After seeing some of the commercials, I noticed that social media is definitely a tool that brand names and companies are turning to in order to further spread the word about their products.

America’s favorite cookie, Oreo is using hip new  Instagram (social media application that aims to grant their users with a quirky and new way to quickly edit and share their images) to get #igers to share their favorite part of the Oreo cookie. At the end of their “Whisper Fight” commercial, I was surprised to see they were encouraging users to get connected with Oreo through Instagram. I was surprised because Facebook  and Twitter are usually what brands and companies use for their social networking.

Oreo being a little different using Instagram,  reaches out to more users showing how important social media is as a tool that  gets consumers and target audiences aware and excited for their product.

I think this is absolutely great. Not only because I’m a fan of Instagram, but also becauseI feel this gets consumers to interact and become a part of advertising in a different way instead of interacting with statuses and tweets, users are using images.

When I tell others that I’m interested in working with advertising, almost everyone brings up the negative stigma attached to advertising and how advertising usually makes people feel insecure and not good or beautiful enough. With brands and companies interacting with consumers through social media, they aren’t specifically  stating that their consumer should be this way or that, instead they are asking for their participation and making their consumers a part of their advertisement. This helps go against advertisement’s negative stigma and brings consumers closer to advertising. I feel that one of the contributing reasons as to why some individuals aren’t excited or amazed by the power of advertising is because they don’t’ know what kind of work goes into it. They are only aware of the messages advertisements send. Now with companies using social media,brands don’t have to send as many messages about their product to the public, they now have their consumers and audience talk and do the message sending about their products instead.

What do you think of your favorite brand names and companies using social media just like us?