Liza Smith-Vedder Presentation: The History of Advertising

I really enjoyed Liza Smith-Vedder’s presentation on The History of Advertising and how advertising works into the newspaper business.  Even though I am an MJD (media studies, journalism, and digital arts) major, I have never learned a whole lot about advertising, so it was cool to be able to get an overview of the history of advertising during this presentation.  A thread that went throughout her presentation was that as long as advertising has existed, people have hated it.  We learned that people are more likely go survive a plane crash rather than click on a banner ad on website.  We also learned about how intrusive people find it to be and how they’ve always seen that way, since way back when malls and stores were created and began to replace corner markets.  Not only do people have a disdain for advertisements, but also people have not trusted advertisements they see for a very long time.  People don’t trust ads, because historically advertisements have been extremely deceiving, which have earned them their reputation as being untrustworthy reputation.  Another theme throughout this presentation is how advertisers are always one step ahead, one step ahead of consumers and one step ahead of government regulations.  They are always finding ways to persuade consumers in not necessarily the most ethical ways to buy their products or services.  An example that we saw many times with cigarette ads.  First they claimed those cigarettes are good for you then when it was outlawed to blatantly lie about your products effects, so the companies started saying that more doctors smoke their cigarettes than any other ones.  Ads are also always one step ahead of the consumer in how they capture the public’s attention.  The advertisements that we see online are so tailored to us, that we don’t even necessarily notice that they are interfering with our online experience.  The example we discussed most was Facebook and how personalized the ads we see are.  This reminded me of in our Global Communications class when we learned about filter bubbles.  While learning about filter bubbles we talked about several different examples and facets of them, but while discussing Facebook, I think we leaned that they use 57 sensors to determine what content (including ads) shows up on your news feed.

Another part of the presentation that I found fascinating was how script has changed over time.  It was just a very small detail of the presentation, but when we were looking at pictures of old newspapers, particularly one from Pennsylvania (which looked like Pennfilvania), it was amazing to see how much lettering in our own language has evolved over time.