Advertising plays an influential role in contemporary living. Born in the eighties, I fondly remember the great advertising campaigns we used to watch on Italian television as kids. Once can almost say that advertising is part of our culture. Who doesn’t remember Ciribi kodak? What about the wonderful Levi’s advertising campaign of the nineties when this hunk comes out of the water with young Mormon girls sneakily and anxiouslywaiting for him to come out wet and naked only for him to come out wearing a wet pair of jeans.
The list of memorable ads and their jingles is endless, at a time when advertising was still considered as just harmless marketing.
Nowadays there has been a shift from Television to Digital marketing which is marketing that takes place via Internet-connected devices. Email marketing, content marketing, social media marketing, and many other facets of digital marketing are essential for today’s entrepreneurs. Digital marketers spend their time studying how people relate to one another online, creating content for online consumption, and mastering digital mediums.
One cannot but mention Cambridge Analytica, who helped Trump in his political campaign. The company has been accused of misappropriating the personal data of about 87 million users of Facebook.
The data of Facebook users was acquired via the 270,000 Facebook users who used a Facebook app called “This Is Your Digital Life.”[36] By giving this third-party app permission to acquire their data, back in 2015, they also gave the app access to information on the user’s friends network. This resulted in the acquisition of the data of about 87 million users, the majority of whom had not explicitly given Cambridge Analytica permission to access their data. The app developer breached Facebook’s terms of service by giving the data to Cambridge Analytica.
Now advertising is set to take yet another step forward. Russian researchers are saying that although it sounds like science fiction, it is very possible for us to have space advertising soon.
Although beverage giants like Pepsi have already spoken about space advertising, nobody knows how these out of the world billboards would look or work.
The Russian researchers are stating that it would cost 65 million dollars to launch 50 satellites for 1 to 3 months.
They estimated that the potential revenue of such advertising would be around 2 million dollars a day.
The ads would be mostly visible during sunrise and sunset therefore it would make more sense for the formations to travel with the sun moving from one city to the other and would appear in the sky like a drone light show.
Although possible it is still very expensive and would definitely be a luxury reserved for those economic giants who would afford it. But how do you feel about it? Do you think this would be going a bit too far or is it a legitimate alternative to advertising as we know it?
