Wasting Half Your Money – a Look Back at Traditional Advertising
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Once upon a time, the only way you could get your message out there was to buy advertising, or convince someone to write something about you. It cost a lot of money, and there wasn’t a really good way to measure the results. As someone (there are arguments as to who) in advertising once said, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted, but I don’t know which half.” And that’s just how it went.
Your choices were newspapers, magazines, outdoor, radio, television, and direct mail. While attempts were made at targeting through industry-developed demographic profiling, the segments were broad (think men 25-34) and targeting buyers beyond those very simple demographics was very difficult. It worked for the large brands who were targeting large segments of the population, but was too broad and ineffective for the average small-to-medium sized business owner.
Because those smaller businesses didn’t have the big budgets, and the targeting was so broad, a lot of advertising dollars were wasted reaching people who weren’t part of their target audience. This was accepted as simply something that came along with advertising.
Traditional advertising also relies on a one-way conversation. Because of that, it found that it needed to be an intrusive as possible to make sure that it would interrupt whatever you were doing so you would pay attention to it. When there wasn’t that much competition, the interruption wasn’t that bad, but as the number of media outlets and ways to advertise increased, the messages became increasingly intrusive, with flashy messages that were aimed at the lowest common denominator (read: stupid).
As for public relations, or PR, it was a private club that you had to pay big bucks to be a part of. You paid some PR guru a ton of money for the privilege of getting to use his network of contacts that he made over years of schmoozing to try and get your message out. The success of your campaign was judges by how many inches of press that you got, not how much the press release actually affected your sales. Press releases were also written specifically with the media in mind, it used terms and jargon that only media people would understand, and even had to formatted in just the right way. If you wanted to play the game, you had to submit to their way of doing things.
Then something called the internet came along. And advertisers and PR people realized that is was an opportunity to reach potential customers, even if they didn’t quite know what to do with it at the time.
To be continued…
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I agree with you on alot of the points you mentioned above.
Dinono.com
John, excellent start to a very exciting subject. I think the use of Social Media will empower small business and start ups, giving them the horsepower to compete with big business.
In fact, in this medium, big business has a distinct disadvantage. Large corporations will not embrace blogging because their legal departments are so uncomfortable with the lack of control that blogging creates. Small business on the other hand can manage the blog space because it is local in nature and smaller in scale.
Looking forward to your next installment. Thanks for sharing.
Nothing new for anyone who has read anything about marketing written in the last decade.
Sorry Mikko, did not realize i was meant to talk to just the advanced people. Not sure if you realize but there are thousands everyday just getting into this industry.
[...] How We Tried to Make a Square Peg Fit Into a Round Hole – Early Online Media Written by John Cow on June 28th, 2009 // (Continued from the previous post: Wasting Half Your Money on Traditional Advertising) [...]
Traditional Advertising is dead for a long time now
and investing money in it is just as stupid as trying to out run a gepard..
Very cool post, Johny
Igor
[...] June 28, 2009How We Tried to Make a Square Peg Fit Into a Round Hole – Early Online Media (Continued from the previous post: Wasting Half Your Money on Traditional Advertising) [...]
[...] (Continued from the previous post: Wasting Half Your Money on Traditional Advertising) [...]
Well I can relate to this as well, I own a retail store and I have goten burnt out too. That is when you need to come up with new and inovated ways to show case your products. It depends on what kind of business you have and how you have been marketing it in the past. For my business all it took was a different aproch to selling. I found a site that accually allowed me to show case my products by using their templates. The best part is that the site is 100% free and that is great cause I am broke! Well if your interested in the site I am talking about it is http://www.use.com they also allow you to upload 100 pictures at a time. I can use these templates on ebay, they also allow you to upload 100 pictures at a time. I can use these templates on ebay, myspace and craigslist too. Ok well I hope this help. Best of luck !!
Very interesting post..I completely agree to what you said…traditional advertising practices were quite expensive.
Cool post …
Adding now a day people moving toward online video ads…
More improved, now we need our online ads to be localized and targeted so we are knocking at http://www.adwido.com