Anne Swarts: The Evolution Of Digital Media

Approximately thirty years ago, Anne Swarts graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a degree in music studies. She went on to say that, “having a degree that has little to nothing to do with journalism or mass communications was and still is fairly common.” She broke into the industry by becoming a secretary at an advertising agency where she quickly fell in love with what she described as a “high energy and somewhat chaotic environment.” After a few years of working her secretary job, Anne heard about a few job openings that dealt directly with clients. From there, she kept getting promotions and eventually became the Senior Broadcasting Producer at Preston Kelly. She started off working strictly with television and radio commercials, …show more content…
She said that the client will decide whether or not they would like it on television and internet, or just the internet. If they go on to choose just the internet, this is where strong budgeting and organization skills come into play. By choosing to only post the ad on a website, the company is choosing a more cost effective space for them, but not for the agency. The cost of producing an ad just for the internet, cost exactly the same as a television ad would, but without the sales from television, so then the agency is not making as much and this is what she claimed to be the biggest struggle with the evolution of digital media becoming the main source. Additionally, they try to figure out where is the best place to reach their audience so that there is little circulation waste. She went on to say that it used to be a little easier based on who the company was trying to target. If it was a younger audience they would use social media platforms or websites like YouTube to reach them and the older audiences were still best reached using television and radio. But now, it is all intertwined and it just makes the job, “a little more exciting and challenging.” What is so challenging about this, is that the pace of this change has increased rapidly. From Anne’s perspective, there are positive and negative sides to this. An upside to content going straight to websites is …show more content…
No new form of media is going to completely kill off advertising. For example, when it comes to radio, it is still relatively traditional, but there are still changes. Advertising agencies as well as internal advertisers are struggling to figure out what and how this new technology works and where advertising fits best and to me that is still interesting and exciting to think about. My overall impression of the industry stays the same as when I entered this introductory class. I still enjoy and will continue to look into advertising, but now I am going to look more into new forms of media in order to keep up with the ever evolving