Recently, community radio station CKUW 95.9 FM celebrated its first anniversary of going ad free. To acknowledge this milestone, volunteers at the station created several programs examining the world of advertising and its impact on all of us.
With so many people spending so many hours a day on the internet, you may be interested to find out that our online activities are not going unnoticed. The big players in advertising are keeping track of who you are and where you are on the world wide web.
No doubt, advertising space on the internet is valuable real estate. And advertisers don’t want to waste their money on pitching you ads you won’t be interested in. These pressures have given rise to targeted or behavioural advertising, with the goal of predicting just who you are as an internet user and putting ads in front of you for products you will actually be interested in.
In this episode of People of Interest, we reach software developer Brian Carr who works on social media software in Austin, Texas, and who discusses the prevalence and use of targeted ads on the internet.
Later in the show, we look at advertising in politics, by examining the culture and intent behind political attack ads.
Green Party leader Elizabeth May comments extensively on this subject in a press conference she held during the last federal election campaign.
The issues surrounding political attack ads are further discussed in an interview with Christopher Adams, Research Director at the national public opinion research firm Probe Research.
