Real World Ads

During my time listening to the radio, I've attempted to analyze the radio ads in a similar way to the print ads we saw in class. This wasn't an especially easy task since my normal reflex is to change the station (if I'm not listening to the Current which has no commercials). I was looking for ways that radio commercials would differentiate themselves from print. In the case of radio ads, they can be specialized by gender, income, education, age, etc. due to the profile of the typical listener to that station since the station must cater to their listeners anyways. For example, 93X is quite clearly a station for a typical young male listener. However, something that I thought was interesting was that many of the internet radio stations have yet to give the advertisers a more narrow range to send to its listeners. For this reason, the internet radio commercials that I've heard have been very broad, making it tough to distinguish one demographic that it's clearly marketed at. Either that, or the commercial could end up not keying up a listener, prompting him/her to switch the internet page just as he/she could switch the radio station in a car the way I do. Billboards have a similar issue to internet radio. Everyone can see the billboard. The advertiser cannot narrow the range of viewers. Therefore, relatively demographic-neutral ads are the best, otherwise a viewer could just look away rather than psychologically taking in the ad at all if the ad doesn't fit their demographic.