Advertising

    Advertising uses particular appeals and strategies to target consumers in ways to get them to buy their product. What I find most interesting is when advertisements are intentionally put in places that they know where their target audience will see it, for instance putting Bud Light ads in a Maxim magazine. The internet has revolutionized this era of targeting audiences in advertising, and as far as pin-pointing their audience, internet advertisements far surpass other mediums.
   Depending on what ad we are talking about fluctuates the type of appeal being used, but for target advertising i would say that these use the appeals of affiliation more than anything else. Advertisements on certain websites pertain exactly to the content of the website, because they know that visitors to the site are most likely interested in what the site has to offer, so advertisements reflect the content of the page. For instance, IMDb.com's ads are going to be advertising movies more than anything else, because the majority of visitors to the site go there for the purpose of looking up films.
   I have an example of this opened in probably just about every tab in my browser. One of which is an advertisement for the HBO mini-series "The Pacific" on the TV section of IGN. Because I am going to this website to look up news and reviews of new TV shows, the advertisement pinpoints me as a target consumer of the product, knowing that it would interest me. This uses the appeal of affiliation because the ad is very relevant to my interests, and knows that if anyone would buy the product, it would most likely be a visitor to a TV review site.