1.3 New Media Theories
Social media have offered everybody so much and they are the driving force of so many changes in every aspect of our lives. Advertising wise, “social media differ from traditional computer-mediated communications in three primary ways” [Berthon et al., 2012]: • We have a relocation of activity from the desktop to the web. This means, greater accessibility. • We have another shift, now the consumer is above everything and his needs must be fulfilled at any cost. Before that, companies had the upper hand and if they made a mistake they could not be as easily exposed like they can be today. The power is in the hands of the consumer. • Finally, we have a relocation of value production from the companies to the consumer. This is due to increased interactivity. A very general classification of social media includes collaborative projects, blogs, user-generated content communities (e.g. Wikipedia), social networking sites, and virtual social worlds [Kaplan and Haenlein, 2010]. “Social media has global reach because of the existence of de facto standard applications. At the same time it represents a powerful personalization tool as it enables individuals to both produce and distribute content by their own participation.” [Okazaki and Taylor, 2013]. “Furthermore”, Shintaro Okazaki and Charles R. Taylor add that “social media goes to mobile, breaking ground in traditional time-location restrictions” [Okazaki and Taylor, 2013]. YouTube is a great example of what social media can achieve. Yes, YouTube has established itself as one of the biggest social media platforms. It is one more of these sites, enriched by the users themselves with content created by the users themselves. The users themselves have managed to entertain the attention of all ages and of course the marketing executives. The fact that YouTube is user-oriented and user-dependent makes it unknown to what anyone can expect. This means that there is always something interesting. In fact, “The definition of entertainment and media has changed so drastically that we do see a lot of growth in that category as companies like Netflix and YouTube come into the space” as Katy Loria mentioned in an interview in 2015. YouTube is a threat to television and it is one of the most interesting cases studies in terms of social media. We definitely see television struggling due to media fragmentation and Katy Loria, currently Chief Revenue Officer at Screenvision believes that media fragmentation certainly plays a role in its decline.
1.3.7
I
Internet privacy and security issues
nteractivity has its limitations. As the years go by, the concern of privacy and how much a company can actually learn about an Internet user without that being un-
ethical, is something that has caused a lot of discussions and questioning. Advertisers are increasingly using very narrow behavioral targeting tactics that identify targeted consumers based on their browsing behavior on the Internet” [Yaveroglu and Donthu, 2008]. 41