Online Gaming In Your Face?
By Lilly Dice
Whether it is on the street or online,
one cannot escape the force that has become the state of Internet gambling.
You cannot hide from it because it is crossing international borders as
easily as George W. Bush's 'war on terrorism' helped invade Iraq. Online
casino gambling and playing poker online has never been as easy and simple,
and you become awestruck by the amount of variety and diversity you have
to choose from when picking the right casino to play at.
This leads one to question whether
online casino gambling is really under the radar, as some say it is, when
all you see when you connect to your ISP is a banner advertisement for
the latest "bonus match" or "new member promotion" that is featured quite
prominently on search engines like, Google, MSN and Yahoo. One starts to
question the credibility of news websites and newspapers too when you're
skimming the headlines and you land on a page full of competitions and
surveys that are being conducted by casino operators. A good example of
this bombardment of 'casino media', which is what I like to call it, is
the news24.com website.
Among the bevy of headlines and other
sections are casino adverts by Piggs Peak and Silver Sands, which are casinos
available to South African gamblers and gamblers in surrounding countries.
They take over the page and invade your monitor like insurance adverts
and other consumer-driven products because of their delightful themes and
colourful graphics. There is no limit to the promotional and marketing
tactics that online casinos will use to get their message out there, and
this can be to their advantage and disadvantage.
It is by no means a moral reflection
of the online casino industry and neither is it a mirror image of our society,
but an enlightenment of what our society has become. Media pervasiveness
has never been as real as it is now in the 'millennium years'. We need
to take a good look at the media out there and realise that companies,
casinos and the like are only trying to use the tools that have been offered
by a society bent on getting a message out there, and one needs to take
the consumption of all kinds of media and look at it in context of what
it is – media.
The Internet allows companies to
do what they will and one could push the boundaries when it comes to design
and graphics on the Net, but when you enter the marketing of the real world,
it becomes a whole other ball game. You have to be ware of legislation
and social responsibility as a company, and one has to start thinking in
the box as opposed to out of it.
This begins to limit one's options
as to where to advertise, when to advertise and how to advertise. Online
casinos have therefore had to look at new and innovative ways to grab new
audiences and to sustain their existing players' interest. The perfect
opportunity arose from the travel industry's "cruise ships", and now in
collaboration with an even more well-established industry, online casinos
and poker rooms are using the tournaments and luxury cruise ships as a
means to get people playing more.
A player's incentive to playing and
winning online is now added to the opportunity of gaining access to exclusive
tournaments that are held on luxury cruise liners, and which offers bigger
better prize pools that one can feel and touch. In other words online gaming
now gives players a real, live and interactive feel for playing online
and the better you are at playing, the more real the prize pool becomes.
In other words, online casinos are making it more real for people to play
online because they not only offer an experience but a pleasing memory
that is sure to last forever.
So you see if you think about it
a little more, you'll begin to realise that it's not online casinos that
are the problem but a society that allows us to tune out what's really
in front of us, which is all media really. This is surely something to
think about because media can be pervasive and this is worrisome, and is
one of the areas that need our constant attention. If you had to tune in
to what you see, you'll realise that online gambling is like any other
industry out there, they all need to send out messages to give them the
assurance that makes them feel like they're needed and wanted, and that
they too are a part of society too.
Lilly Dice is a journalist who writes
for Online Gambling Doctor
and Online Poker Doctor. Dubbed
Lil' Dice on her websites, she has gained experience in the news and entertainment
industry and has a background in broadcast and online journalism.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com
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