Week 13 Assignment, Part 1

I am going to recycle some information from an earlier blog post to complete this assignment. I just plan ran out of time to do some thorough research to do the assignment to my normal degree of completeness. I do have some opinions about online advertising that I'd like to express so here we go!

The companies that I analyzed come straight from my Week 3 Assignment, Part 2 and they are:
Yamaha Motorcycles
Revzilla
North County House of Motorcycles
Shred Moto Co.
Attack Performance

The effective advertisers are Yamaha, Revzilla and Shred Moto Co. They are effective because they use a broad spectrum of online advertising between them. In Yamaha's case they also do traditional advertising in the form of TV advertisements and magazine ads. North County and Attack are pretty ineffective as far as actual advertising goes. I covered in the earlier post that Attack has good byproduct advertising because they sponsor a rider that is heavy in social media self promotion. They aren't actually very good at advertising for themselves. North County uses email marketing and some limited social media ads that are plain, boring and just junk. Yamaha is effective because they get their name out by using the financial power of the large company that they are. They also promote race teams and I have seen them team up with a local track to do demo days on dirt bikes. Revzilla combines funny videos along with ads, gear reviews and a newsletter to promote themselves. Shred Moto Co. uses only online social media advertising to push their products. They do it by posting traditional style ads and pictures of riders using the products in cool action photos.

At this point in my ad saturated life, not much in the form of online advertising actually gets my attention. Growing up a member of the couch potato generation, I have been exposed to ads since my wee years and by now I am pretty immune to ads. The type of "advertising" that I respond to are ads that aren't ads ads all. Gear reviews like the ones Revzilla does or demo days like I mentioned Yamaha doing are things that stick with me and have influenced my buying decisions. Shred Moto Co. connects with me by showing their products in action by using good pictures of guys riding bikes with passion. That passion is what I am drawn too. The annoying ads are the ones that North County does. Random emails showing me sales for things I have never bought in my life. Flashy ads, ads for gear that I just bought because of some bot that planted a tracking cookie onto my computer. Going out of business sales for that perpetually closing business and "sales" showing me just reduced prices that are the prices the products usually are priced at. These are the things ineffective and annoying.

As far as comparing online to social media advertising, only the types of advertising that I mentioned in the previous paragraph as effective are worth it to me. Like I mentioned, ads are automatically filtered by my brain housing group thought center. Impact comes from quality of the not-advertising ads not by cool text or pretty pictures. Social media enables this new type of advertising, but unfortunately also allows for worthless traditional ads to attempt to burrow their way into my head.

I hope this rambling tirade makes some sense. Call me out on it if it doesn't in my comments! Have a nice evening class.