Tag / Native advertisments

by agosser

Stone Fired Pizza—the Must-Try Pizza

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My friends and I decided to go out to eat on Sunday night to take a much needed break from studying for our midterms.  It’s always hard to make a decision about what kind of food to get in Gainesville because there are so many choices. After weighing our different options, we decided to get pizza, one of our favorite college comfort foods.

We sat down at dinner and talked about how hectic the week before spring break has been. All of us are headed to different places over break because we all live in different areas. We always say that it’s interesting that we all ended up crossing paths because a few of my friends and I live several hours away from Florida.

Amidst our conversations, we figured out that each of us was going to try a different kind of pizza. Gainesville is not only the home of the Gators, but it is also home to so many different kinds of pizza. Over the years we’ve been in college it has become one of our favorite things to get to eat. We always go to get pizza after football and basketball games.

Recently, pizza that’s made in a wood-fired oven has become one of my favorite things to get. Pizza that is cooked in this way is classified as stone fired pizza. The main thing that makes this kind of pizza taste so good is that the pizza oven has a small fire inside of it, which allows the pizza crust to become cooked perfectly and make the pizza have a more authentic Italian taste to it.

We had to take pictures of the pizza when our food arrived because it looked so good, and we have always have had a habit of posting photos of our food on our social media accounts. Some of our pizzas can be seen below.

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After having our food, we unanimously decided that stone fired pizza would become one of our go-to foods in Gainesville. The place that we had our pizza at was called Piesanos, located on W. University Ave. right across from campus. We definitely will be going back many times because the pizza had so much flavor to it and it was brought out to us very quickly. Our meal was a great way to take a break from studying and was able to give us enough pizza to take home and eat later that night.

Information on making stone fired pizza was retrieved from https://www.thespruceeats.com/make-pizza-in-a-wood-fired-oven-2018189

by Kea

What Exactly Are You Selling?

High all! Everyone is hard at work creating fun and exciting projects. In the next few hours, students are going to start posting their versions of Native Ads.

What are Native Ads? Well, to put it simply, Native Ads are paid advertisements that are designed to look like the surrounding content. You’ve probably seen these ads on someone’s Instagram, framed with the words “sponsored content.” Or this New York Times article asking if college is still worth it, sponsored by Discover Student Loans (of course, they said yes).

And let’s not forget the infamous Scientology ad posted by The Atlantic. That didn’t go well for them, but it did raise important questions: First, how should companies go about the business of advertising in a rapidly changing environment. People are not tuning into television for traditional ads. In fact, I just updated my HULU subscription to get rid of ads.

Second, what are the ethics involved in creating advertisements that blend into regular digital media content? The response to The Atlantic article suggests that people want to, in fact, believe they have a right to, know when they are being pitched to.

Everyone in my class agrees that Native Advertisements walk a fine line of ethics. It’s one thing to have very obvious Toyota product placement in an episode of Bones (which is another interesting conversation), but it is another thing altogether to have major publications like The Atlantic housing a propaganda piece. The academic equivalent of this would be a scientist and professor conducting research, writing an article, and publishing an article on the benefits of Fentynal without disclosing that his or her work is sponsored by a pharmaceutical company.

Well, maybe not that dramatic, but this is serious business.

Another thing we have tried to suss-out in this class is what constitutes a native ad. I have a colleague who believes that anything we encounter that presents a call-to-action, especially a call that involves a product or service, is a Native Ad; this includes book reviews or film reviews.

I’m not sure I agree. It is another aspect of advertising that will have to be debated in our new digital age.

In any case, the students had to compose Native Ads. You will see a variety of content. Some of the ads will be in the form of blog posts, and some will take other forms. There are two main goals for this assignment: Try to sell something, but don’t make it obvious that you are trying to sell something. That was the task before them.

This also gives the students some experience with creating ads in digital spaces like WordPress, which is a platform many news organizations use already. I look forward to seeing what they have come up with.

-Dr. W