Media is creeping in to everything...

Well it's really no surprise, but I have discovered some crazy new ways that the media is creeping into our beloved iPhones... Before if you downloaded a free app from the App Store, it would either be a watered down version of the real application or have banner ads on the screen the whole time you would use the app. NOW they have come up with an even better tactic. Obviously people like the free apps more, simply because they don't have to dish out any of their hard earned money on them. However the software development company needs to pay their employees somehow, no one wants to work for free, so the way free things make money is through polluting their software with advertisements. This does not surprise me.

What DID surprise me is that when I downloaded an app called "most addicting game" (which I used to have before, when it didn't have any ads at all) I began playing the game that was already familiar to me. However every third time I lost the game would go to a black screen load for a couple seconds and then show me a full screen ad of some sort. After playing for about 5 minutes, about the 4th or 5th time the ad popped up, it said "Are you male or female?" and there was no way to bypass this without answering. So you click one, then the next time the ad page came up it asked what age group I was in, again without letting me bypass without an answer. Interested in if this would affect what ads would show up next, I kept playing mostly to find out, since I was tired of the game already. Sure enough the ads became more oriented to things that I would be more likely to buy, such as laptops, and men's deodorant, just to name a couple memorable ones. I was astonished by what they had done, not only are they playing ads, but now they are making sure that you actually care about the ads your seeing. I dunno, I thought it was crazy... and realistically a very good idea from a marketing perspective.