After reading the passage below, answer the questions that follow. Be sure to "submit" your response for each question. You will initially receive full credit for each question, but your grade may change once your instructor reviews your responses. Be sure to check the grade book for your final grade.
Interactive Advertising: Persuasion for a Generation Z Audience
If you were born in 1997 or later, advertisers want you, even if they are not quite sure what to do with you. They call you the iGen, or Generation Z (because you follow Generation Y, or the Millennials). Your Generation X parents (born between 1965 and 1980 were challenging enough, with their tendency to videotape television programs and speed through commercials. And your Generation Y (Millennial) predecessors (born between 1981 and 1996) were trickier, with their TV and video streaming and customized, commercial-free programming. But you may be even harder to reach, in that you not only stream video on demand, but you also tend to spend more time on social media and enjoy entertainment content that comes from around the world. This presents a challenge for advertisers, as well as a wealth of opportunities. They want to reach you, they want to persuade you, and they are just starting to figure out how.
Several strategies they are employing involve viral marketing — marketing that takes advantage of preexisting social networks. Marketing through social networks exists offline (where it is better known as a word-of-mouth campaign), but it blossoms online as friends easily share information about products and services with other friends in their online networks (now often called electronic word-of-mouth, or e-WOM). Advertisers can also produce an advertisement and get it in front of millions of potential customers, so-called “viral advertising,” provided that you find it funny or compelling enough to forward a link to your friends (Seo st al., 2018).
Marketers have also tapped into your generation’s unprecedented technological know-how to get you involved in the advertising process. Contests for user-generated advertisements can boost interest in a product or service, and the ads themselves (just like professional ads) can potentially go viral. They also lend an edgy, young image to the product being advertised. Advertisers also sponsor popular influencers on Instagram or other social media to promote brands. Marketers are counting on their popularity, credibility, and perceived relatability to their followers to have a powerful impact on the new generation’s consumer behavior (Cotter, 2018). Whether these new tricks of the advertising trade will lure in your Generation Z dollars is yet to be determined.