“Traditional advertising is dying.”
In my line of work, I hear that line a lot.
I work for the Yellow Pages Group of Canada, a company that is associated with one of the most traditional forms of advertising you can think of. I also happen to work on the online side of the business, specifically in relation to online performance marketing products, such as search engine marketing. In other words, the industry that’s killing traditional advertising.
Traditional advertising refers not only to yellow pages directories, but print newspaper advertising, radio broadcast advertising, and some push it as far as broadcast television advertising.
I have seen all the numbers. I have read all of the reports. Internet advertising is still a growing business. In fact the amount of time consumers spend on the internet is still vastly disproportionate to the amount of money businesses are spending online.
That tells me two things:
- First, that if internet advertising is a growing business, and there is a finite amount of marketing dollars in the market, by definition, other forms of advertising will take a hit.
- Second, there’s still a lot of types of advertising out there that businesses are spending money on. And if they’re spending money on it, it means it’s working to some degree.
One of the things I’ve noticed in the past couple of years of working in the industry is that internet marketers seem to have an endless bag of reports and numbers that they can pull from to justify just about every single argument they can make. The scariest part about these numbers and reports are that most of them are created by groups that have a vested interest in making money online. What else would we expect them to say?
In defense of the fact that traditional advertising is dying, and that web advertising is gaining ground, someone pointed out to me the other day that after decades of advertising during the Super Bowl, Pepsi decided to instead do a Facebook marketing campaign.
Fair. Pepsi was absent from the Super Bowl. But do you know who did advertise during the Super Bowl for the first time ever? Google. Google has also been using print and billboard advertising to market its various apps and its Nexus One phone. They’ve also used billboard advertising to advertise their search engine outside of North America, where they generally tend to have a lower share of the search market.
So, Google, the ultimate symbol of internet advertising does traditional advertising. They must know something, that the other internet marketers don’t…
Yes, traditional advertising will decline, simply because online advertising will continue to grow. However, it will not disappear, and the simple reason is that it’s still effective. Yes, we spend a lot of our time in front of glowing screens, but we also do a lot of other things during our day that aren’t connected to the internet, and until we abandon them to live our lives entirely virtually, there will be a use for traditional advertising.
Let me put this another way. Internet marketers spend their lives on the internet, so they sometimes forget that other people – normal people – have slightly healthier, more balanced lives. People read. People listen to the radio. People watch TV. Believe it or not, people flip through phone books. People drive by billboards on their way to work. People go to sporting events. People live outside of the web.
Traditional advertising is still alive because it’s still effective.
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6 comments ↓
Great post Adam.
I do agree with your point. I believe that the perfect marketing campaign is a well balanced mix between online marketing and traditional marketing. If a marketer decides to spend his full budget on online media, then it will results into low to medium return. If the offline strategy support the online initiative and vice versa, then you have a great return.
To relate the super-bowl, Volkswagen is a good example of a well balanced mix. VW broadcasted a Commercial on TV (Punch for VW) during the super-bowl. They also created a microsite that allows users to select a punch and select a car. This application has also been published to social media platforms and the TV commercial on Youtube. The objective is to create a viral campaign.
this is the best example of a well balanced mix
Traditional is still alive and will remain. Marketers need to make smart choices with media planning and not let the ”industry trend” dictates their strategic thinking.
e.
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Adam Reply:
February 18th, 2010 at 3:08 pm
Great example, Eric. In the end it comes down to the funnel. Internet marketing does a great job of converting interested customers, but those customers need to first be aware, and traditional media still does a better job of this than internet marketing, in most cases.
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Although I’m in the internet marketing business, nothing frustrates me more than someone saying traditional advertising is dead. During the Superbowl, several bloggers claimed GoDaddy and Dodge failed to making these claims based off of the stats provided from #Brandbowl. They were actually crowning champions and trying to make arguments solely based on what people were tweeting! I was blown away…
The number of people who tweet is only a token of the amount of people who watch the game. Not to mention, the majority of the people on twitter aren’t representative of the average football fan.
Like you said, “Internet marketers spend their lives on the internet, so they sometimes forget that other people – normal people – have slightly healthier, more balanced lives.” As soon as these people start to realize that there is more out there than twitter and facebook. They will realize that a combination of the New Marketing and Traditional Marketing will yield better results. They both have their benefits and both have their setbacks. At the end of the day, people are still going to use the web and some people are still going watch commercials.
Its like Vinegar and Baking Soda. Alone they can be great. But when you mix them together, you get to see magic.
Great Post Adam.
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Adam Reply:
February 18th, 2010 at 3:11 pm
Another great point, that I didn’t cover in this post. The simple fact of the matter is that all types of marketing generally work better if used in conjunction with one another. Very few companies have great success with only a single form of marketing. Thanks for the great analogy, Ross!
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Another great post, Adam.
You know, I’ve always wondered why there have never been advertising pages between chapters in novels, like there are in magazines and comicbooks. Don’t get me wrong; I wouldn’t WANT them there, but it’s always struck me as odd that it was virtually the only place I didn’t have advertising rammed down my throat. I also wonder if that will change as more and more people switch to buying and reading digital copies of books, rather than paper copies, to read on their Kindles and things.
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[...] DiStefano explained this very well in his post: “Is Traditional Advertising Dying?” he writes, Internet marketers spend their lives on the internet, so they sometimes forget that [...]
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