Dublin, 02.04.2025 – In a digitalized world paid media and advertising plays a crucial role. You, as a company, want to be seen and which better place than social media, where your customers are, could there be. These ads are tailored to the customer base and align with each stage of the customer journey map. They have a clear call to action and often aim to be perceived in the subconscious of the customer and therefore building up your brand image etc. In this article I have brought one example of a paid ad on which one can easily identify the different parts of paid ads and I will also present my own paid ad. 

The first paid ad I gathered is from a campaign by the New York Times.

The primary objective of the advertisement is to gather donations, subscriptions and to encourage readers to financially support independent journalism. The ad is made up of five different parts with Truth taking up the majority of the space. Following is the sentence “It’s more important now than ever.”, written in broad letters. Right after that follows the call to action: “Support our mission in a new way.”, as well as the button to get to the website titled “support now”. Lastly the logo can be seen on the bottom right hand side. The curiosity of this ad isn’t created by tacky art work but rather by the simplicity and hyperboles being used like “Truth”, “ever”. 

Which audience does this ad want to reach? It targets socially and politically engaged individuals in demand of serious and independent journalism, which focuses on telling the truth and only the truth. Furthermore it targets a younger demographic reading their news digitally rather than manually like older generations. The New York Times utilizes platforms like Google, Facebook etc. for their ads to reach this demographic. 

When looking at stages of the customer journey this ad can be identified under the stages “decision” or “consideration”. The users are probably already aware of the existence of the brand and likely trust it as a serious news source. Through emotional words being used in the campaign they get encouraged to support – be it through donations, memberships or else.  

For one task of the DCCE course I had to create a paid ad on my own. I opted for it to be simple, modern, clean and to have a call to action. Because our website is all about blog posts it was clear to me that I should be advertising a new post. I wrote about my experiences staying at Griffith College and how it affected me. From there on out I created the paid ad. 

It utilizes a clear overview while staying very minimalistic. The title is catchy and creates curiosity. For design purposes I included a picture fitting to the article and also used a clear call-to-action.

Through this minimalistic approach and the call-to-action the reader is left in the dark and will become curious. Because there is no info about price or else the inhibition is low and the probability of interaction is high. 

Speaking from a customer journey stage point-of-view my ad falls under “consideration”. It is made for students thinking about studying abroad and furthermore who even think about studying in Dublin. The title promises deeper meaning and because it is strictly not transactional it will create an interest.