Careers in Online Advertising

Online advertising is a relatively new field, so jobs are being created to adapt to original advertising specializations. It is very complex, but still maintains basic needs by any agency, which require a vast range of skills.

Career Overview website describes some of these jobs, but I have explained how they would shift to online advertising. They include:

Advertising Media Planners decide the distribution of online media content. They are responsible for making many choises affecting the delivery of the campaign message to the consumer or audience.

Media traffic personnel need to be well informed about the demographic segments of the audience that they reach. The media traffic personnel purchases space and time in certain areas across the Internet to reach their consumer. They also regulate traffic on the site itself.

Copywriters, illustrators, and creative individuals create the actual writing and illustrating of advertisements. They are responsible for drawing storyboards, writing copy, designing headlines and body copy, and sometimes taking part in the actual formation of advertisements.

Production Managers are in charge of the actual physical advertisements. Working in cooperation with exterior advertising producers, production managers guarantee that each advertisement is finished successfully.

Directors of Advertising and/or Public Relations are in charge of everything in advertising or public relations excluding sales. Directors manage the planning, production, creation, and budgeting of campaigns. The director of advertising and director of public relations are usually two different positions. The different kinds of work depends on the size of the company or organization a director works.


Public Relations Specialists manage an organization’s public relations. Specialists make sure programs are created to match public attitudes, ensuring an organization has public awareness. They try and shape public opinion and gain interest and action.

Search Engine Optimization requires a person who is innovative, well organized, understand design and marketing techniques.

Several skills are required for each of these jobs, such as understanding the advertising industry, organization, creativity, artistic ability, management skills, communication skills, social skills, forming analysis of techniques and formulating an analysis of your ideas and goals.

One of the most successful ad campaigns that I have seen is the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty. Upon entering the site you will see the headline, “Real Women Have Real Curves”. Throughout the site, you can ‘click’ on different women to hear their stories about how the Dove Campaign has changed their lives. Some important aspects of the website include a forum for women to debate from all around the world. It holds beauty workshops for young girls and other women to learn about what they should value about being a woman. It shows photographs from sixty-seven different female photographers, has fundraisers to help in self-esteem in teenagers who are constantly bombarded with images of sex, slimness and a ‘perfect’ body. It shows diverse women of all ages, ethnicities, races, sizes, backgrounds, cultures and geographic areas. It's even used convergence to bring different media together and the campaign has been extremely successful around the world.

Another is the Tale of Two Ad Campaigns.

There are many companies throughout the world that are online advertising agencies, some of them include: Idearc Media’s Search Marketing Services, Z7media, A & M Media, Geary Interactive and Market Insight. To find a list of agencies or to find a job in online advertising, please visit this website.

Online Video Advertising

Online video advertising is a fairly recent technological breakthrough that is prevalent and significant to advertisers, media companies and Internet users all at the same time.

The popularity of online videos has taken the Internet by storm. YouTube is a cultural phenomenon that allows users to gather, share and critique videos. YouTube is it's own community and many who go there find comfort, share knowledge both through entertainment purposes and by gathering information.

YouTube even has an informative piece on the future of online advertising.
Not only entertainment, but news organizations and informational broadcasters use Internet video in conjunction with traditional forms of media to generate advertisers and gain viewership. CNN, for example, is a large news television station and conglomerate of generating news and informing the public. However, with it's website, it gathers viewers and with adding recent videos teamed with the stories it uses technological convergence to its advantage and gains more readers.

Advertisers can use this as a means to increase profit margin and to direct ads to a demographic audience and appeal to the mass audience of Internet viewers.
Many websites have blogs, videos and user generated comments. I can log on to YouTube and write pretty much anything that I want about a video, just as on a blogpost you can write comments and people can comment on your comments. Is this a nuisance or a goldmine?

Like with any technological breakthrough, it has its advantages as a goldmine, but it also has its disadvantages of being a nuisance. Sometimes through news stories and entertainment, it can be a nuisance to read things that people have written with no means of subject matter or relevance. However, this provides an advantage, because people's voices can be heard, without restriction or limited speech. It gives the user the power, just as in citizen journalism. People can use their voices through this medium and obtain a sense of community and it provides feedback to advertisers, producers and web analysts who are trying to break down demographics and appeal to emotion needs of the consumer.

The advertiser conundrum is finding a way to generate clicks or views of online videos without causing intrusion and gaining profit. When I am on a website, and I click on a link and it directs me to a video that I didn't want to view, I get agitated and annoyed by the intrusion. I can see people's frustration when they are online as well.

To solve this problem, one way, I believe, is to include advertisements within the video in the mid roll ads or post-roll ads. Mid-roll ads can be an advantage because you gain customer awareness, post roll ads can be an advantage because you have the customer and they are still watching, however, people can easily close a window. Pre-roll ads are difficult as well, because they immediately intrude on the customer, just as mid-roll ads interrupt a viewing segment and break viewer's concentration and patience.

In general, I think there is one way to resolve the problem of intrusion and still be able to achieve the advertiser's profit margin and to appeal to certain demographic representations of society. Advertisers can do this using contextual targeting. Although some may see it as a form of privacy-intrusion, advertisers can use your information and contextual targeting methods to better serve the customer and make sure they appeal to their needs and values, just as behavioral targeting.
There is no answer to finding the Holy Grail of Online Video Advertising, as discussed in the article.

Online video advertising is very new and still undetermined as far as the most beneficial and user-generated aspects of the adverting world. However, the basic knowledge of the advertising system, using creative techniques, contextual targeting, understanding where and when people view ads and inventing new methods to reach this media-savvy online audience still exists and is important to maintain and alter to reach the public.

Google Adsense

Since my application for google adsense is still under review, I am going to talk about search engine optimization. According to the text, search engine optimization is about improving and gaining more volume of traffic to your site using natural ways.

Words and common word phrases can be used and "ranked" towards the top and used in search engines to help drive traffic to the site.

According to the notes, you need content:
– That will use targeted keywords that people are likely to use
while searching
– That should be updated frequently
– That has benefits oriented copy
– Updated white paper collections
– Downloadable works
– And a spider friendly website



A spider is a robot/ bot that crawls through websites. It gathers information and helps in the optimization process.

Some other tips are to use as few words as you can and choose the right words to generate traffic. The more links that you have the better your site will look.

Meta tags, according to the notes, are information inserted into the "head" area of your web pages. The meta keywords tag allows you to provide additional text for crawler-based search engines to index along with your body copy.

Some other ways to improve and increase search optimization are to make sure you add misspelled words, commonly used phrases to improve traffic. Also, make sure that your site is professional and presentable to clients and possible employers. If I am in the business of making money or driving more traffic to my site, I would try to increase search optimization as much as possible and use word of mouth technique to generate interest among family and friends without having "click-fraud" be an issue. However, I would also use it as a resume or portfolio basis for professional aspects of online media of web analytics.