I Guess You Can Perfrom an Experiment on Just About Anything…

So this is our final blog post, and I must say it quite an experience. We have learned about a lot of different types of research and applied almost all of it to the real world. The final topic we discussed was experiments; and as silly as it may sound you can pretty much do an experiment on anything.

            I read two blogs from our classmates, and they talked about two completely different experiments that are very out of the ordinary. In Vanessa’s blog she discusses an experiment on how a group of people in France tried to destroy vines for a particularly winery. They did an experiment to try and find out that the vines were bad. I find this to be hysterical; I can’t believe a group in France actually tried to destroy vines from a perfectly good winery.

            The next blog I came across was Lisa’s blog she also managed to find a very meaningless and actually funny experiment done on the one and only Lindsay Lohan. They did an experiment on the types of foods she ate in prison. I did not hear about this on the news while she was in prison, for all of two weeks or so? But that’s besides the fact, these experiments are actually very funny and go to show that you don’t always need to have a very serious topic to research. 

A New Form of Advertising?

            Being interested in advertising, I began to think about the different ways research can contribute to how and advertising campaign will go, if it will be successful or not. I recently read an article about a new type of advertising, something I have never heard of, but seems to growing at a steady pace: SMS advertising. This is a fairly new idea, “mobile advertising”, and there is not much information about how effective it is, and what is contributing to its success.

            This research was done to investigate the significance of a number of factors associated with SMS advertising through an experimental study. They found that incentive, interactivity, appeal, product involvement, and attitude towards SMS advertising directly influences the attitude toward the advertisement, attitude toward the brand and purchase intention. In order to improve the effectiveness of SMS advertising, they need to have a stronger focus on these factors.

            The procedure that was performed was that they split up groups of people and showed them advertisements on their phones. One hundred percent of the people owned cell phones and sixty-nine percent used SMS 1+ daily. They showed both groups different ads with different attributes, such as interactivity, to see which ones stuck in their heads. The researches then collected their data based on all of these different characteristics to formulate their conclusion.

            I feel like this is where advertising is heading; we have already concurred the Internet, why not move to everyone’s cell phones? This study proved that just about everyone has a cell phone, they had 100% of the participants have one, so why not go one step further and start advertising over text messages? This study was done out of the University of Athens in 2007, so I don’t see why it wouldn’t be coming to the United States in a very short time.

            We see advertisements everywhere, whether we’re on the highway or on our favorite website, we can’t escape them, so why not begin send them to us in SMS text messages? This could be the next way to reach consumers, in a cheaper and less time-consuming way. However this also could be the next thing burdening the average American consumer, yet another advertisement clouding our minds on a daily basis. 

Who Likes Internet Advertisements Anyway?

Surveys are a big part in the research world, and can give you a lot of information in a quick, cheap way. Being someone who is interested in advertising, I decided to try and find how advertisers use surveys to help find what is working, and what is not. This article explains the usefulness of Internet advertising, and what types of advertising is catching the user’s eye. In the year 2010 it is said that we are more likely to act upon internet ads than we were in 2009, according to an Opinion Research Corporation consumer preference survey by Adfusion.

            According to consumers, we have more of an eye for ads within the articles, whether they are about brands or something else, rather than banners or pop-up ads. I find this to be very interesting, that our interest in ads on the Internet has grown within one year. The Internet has become a main source of how we find or research anything, and now it is one of the main sources of how we see our advertisements.

            For an advertiser I feel it is very important to know what types of ads will get the attention of their targeted public, or just the public in general. By using a survey they are getting an idea of what the people want, this is a fast and vey reliable way to get their information for the future so their ads will be noticed. With the Internet being a source used for just about anything, it is important that advertisers also know how to get noticed. This medium is one of the best ways to reach their targeted public, however this target audience has to notice these ads, not just ignore them.