Advergaming has been widely frowned upon by parents for being essentially online super commercials. Cereal producers like Kellogg’s, Millsberry, and Post have received negative attention for having cool games online for kids. However they are only small players in the Advergame front. No one has more advergames than Children Television Network Cites.
The Cartoon Network website is crawling with more than 200 free online games featuring popular Characters like Ben 10, Afro Samurai, and Star Wars.
Nickelodean’s www.nick.com features loads of games starring Avatar, Spongebob and those cute little rug rats.
Family favorite Disney also has loads of advergames on its website featuring the famous Disney Princesses, Tinker Bell, and Mater from Cars.
While parents have clamored to disapprove of food producers advertising to children there has been little complaint about how much networks are advertising to children. While it may be mostly harmless fun a lot of these sites are also selling to kids. Cartoon Network sales ringtones and mobile backgrounds. Both Disney and Nickelodeon have online stores selling products from famous characters. And to add to it all 2/3 of the websites heavily feature ads form the same food companies parents of the childhood obesity era have complained about!!!
World Famous chef and talk show host Rachael Ray has added some spice to her media menu. While the chef’s famous meals take 30 minutes you can surely navigate to your favorite recipe online in less than half the time! Ray’s official page http://www.rachaelray.com/ features a weekly updated recipes, user friendly blogs, and a news letter. She also has a website for her daytime tv talk/cooking show http://www.rachaelrayshow.com/ This page features online video
She also has a separate website Yum-o (http://www.yum-o.org/ ) that advertises her non-profit organization. That website features cute online games and a tool to help those who want to donate find food banks. This website also features a newsletter and family friendly recipes.
Not to be outdone Ray is stepping head long into new technology. Now she not only has multiple TV shows across cable and network stations and two official websites but she also is offering to provide access to fans on their most private technological possession… their cell Phones!!!
She offers two opportunities to interact via mobile. One option is to go through the Food Network mobile service by Texting FOOD to 36636. The other is through the Rachael Ray Recipes on the Run service. This service offers access to recipes and a special recipe creator. This AT&T service costs 2.99.
There has been some debate over the advertising Practices of search engines. Basically some search engines take money from companies to place that companies name higher in a search. For instance Radio Shack could pay MSN.com to put its name higher in the results for searches like “buy computer.” As you can tell many web users would decry this practice as unfair. Instead of finding what your looking for instead many searchers fear they will only find “sponsored” links.
If the knowledge that your search engine websites are taking money and skewing your results is startling how do you feel about the idea that webpages are designing themselves to trick web crawlers into placing them higher. The only difference here is that instead of giving money to search engines they are paying outside consultants.
But then there are the times when we need search engines to filter our results. As a new parent I would be very upset if my child was searching for school work and found nasty things. I am pleased that major search engines like www.Yahoo.com and www.Google.com offer safe search. This changes the results of searches too.
Lastly there are searches that inadvertently bring up negative or hate group websites. Google had a problem previously where the word “JEW” when search brought up an antisemitic website as the number one result. Needless to say the website http://www.jewwatch.com/ was glad to get all that attention when their views went up from 2 to 4. But this was possibly a time in which the website needed to skew the results again. Google did issue an apology http://www.google.com/explanation.html and currently Wikipedia results are number 1 and 2. (WHo would have thought!)
My is there ever times that Search Engine results need to be adjusted?
We know how large ministries are using media to market themselves but what effects do technological advances afford the local ministries? Can John the Baptist Lutheran get an assist from Diggit.Com? Can St. Francis Catholic get a spot on De.lic.io.us? The truth is that the World Wide Web is open for every one. Even if your church can’t afford to host a website don’t be dismayed Social websites are here to save the day!
MYSpace makes it happen for ST. Paul Community Baptist
This ministry took advantage of the opportunity. www.Myspace.com is often capitalized on when people want to meet new friends or new dates. This ministry decided that Myspace had more potential than that and now has its information on the web. Complete with photo slides and blog entries!
Another way social websites are helping ministries market themselves is by just giving them an opportunity to be seen. Here is West Virginia born Mark Walker getting a chance to be heard on Youtube.
Other options of new media
If those social sites have too much competition then there are gospel social sites like www.gospeltube.com that can be used instead. This way you can avoid having to compete with the likes of Star Wars kid or Sarah Palin.
Also there are specialty sites like www.Ministrymarketingcoach.com that can help non profit religious groups to advertise their ministries.
