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Advertisements are everywhere. Brand names, slogans, and images are bombarded at consumers every day: commercials on television shows; billboards on the sides of highways; hidden promotions when movie characters use certain brand names; and endorsements by celebrities and famous sports stars on televised and live sports events. These types of bombardments and subliminal messages are discussed on the page about short arguments. In this section, I will focus on the bombardment of advertising on the Internet. There are two major forms of advertisement on the Internet: ad banners and pop-up ads. All commercial websites have an ad banner at the top. An ad banner is a link; if you click on it, you will go to the website it is advertising. The banner itself is usually rectangular in shape with an image or message that try and persuade the reader to click on it. Some ad banners try to trick a consumer into clicking the link by having what appears to be a place to enter information, when in fact a click will send the reader to their website, instead of the appearance of a cursor. In the case that a cursor appears, information can be entered without going to the website. Other tricky ad banners appear to be an error message, with a gray background and a red circle with an x in the center, followed by instructions. These, and other tricks used with ad banners, are examples of peripheral advertising aimed at mindless consumers (Brehm et al, 2002)^. Some websites use pop-up ads. Pop-up ads are not used as often as ad banners. When you click on a link or enter the URL of a site that uses a pop-up ad, the advertisement literally pops up as another window. It is often difficult to avoid seeing the message on the pop-up advertisement. Most windows can be closed without looking at the content by right-clicking, then selecting 'close' from the options that appear. Many pop-up ads have been programmed to show up on top of other windows when right-clicked on, even though most windows only do this when they are left-clicked on. Between ad banners, pop-up ads, celebrity endorsement of products on live and televised event, billboards, and all of the other types of ads consumers are bombarded with, it is easy to see that advertisers are trying to make it hard for us to escape their messages. This bombardment engrains brand names and logos into our minds without our thinking about it. Bombardment, therefore, is a very effective type of peripheral advertising which exploits the frequency effect, in which we remember information because it is repeated to us often (Brehm et al, 2002)^. As in the case of subliminal advertising, greater consumer awareness decreases the persuasive effects of bombardment. |