Individual Assignment no. 2

Question:

Are the sponsored search ads on Google or Yahoo a type of informative or persuasive advertising or both? Give examples of ads that fall into each of these types and an ad that falls into both types. Why is it important to make a distinction between these two types?
Answer:
In order to identify what type of advertising are sponsored search ads on Google or Yahoo we must to define the categories informative or persuasive advertising of first. To do it we need to mention first that both of them belong to Product-Oriented Advertising, where most advertising spending is directed toward the promotion of a specific good, service or idea. In most cases the goal of product advertising is to clearly promote a specific product to a targeted audience. Marketers can accomplish this in several ways from a low-key approach that simply provides basic information about a product (informative advertising) to blatant appeals that try to convince customers to purchase a product (persuasive advertising) that may include direct comparisons between the marketer’s product and its competitor’s offerings (comparative advertising).
From the definition above we can clearly see that sponsored search ads on Google or Yahoo belong to informative type of advertising as they just give you the general information about the problem which interests the prospective customer in the given time (see example in the link – sponsored ads: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=The+Best+Diet+Pills+for+Sale&btnG=Search or the picture below as ads change all the time).

Sponsored search ads are limited to a number of key words and expressions on the screen and they can’t provide you enough persuasive information for making a choice at this point. But if the customer follows the advertised link to the advertiser’s web-site here he will be able to see persuasive type of advertising, located on the website (see example in the link – http://www.phenocerin.com/google/index.html?gclid=CMeOvKKt844CFQhtFQodpFuVEA).
I believe that it is not right to claim that sponsored search ads on Google or Yahoo can be of pure persuasive type, but they can have some elements of persuasive type as shown in the first link (the last sponsored ads, stating “25lbs in 30 Days- No Diet”. It tries to persuade the customer that its kind of product has superior features and the web-site itself gives more persuasive information later as shown in example 2. So we can assume that some Sponsored search ads fall under both categories simultaneously.
From my point of view the importance of distinction between above mentioned types of advertising is in way how they affect customers and how customers react on them. If informative advertising is not considered like advertising, but like a help for the customer looking for a specific product, then persuasive advertising is perceived like subjective and annoying ads until the customer specifically looks for it. As those types of advertising also have different purpose (to give information for attracting the customer (informative) and to persuade to buy (persuasive)) they can be regulated by different way both by government and company legislation. Different price strategies for allocation of such types of ads may apply too.