Advertising

Red Rock Canyon looking towards Colorado Springs

Advertising in Colorado Springs

We all know what advertising is.  The real question is “Has advertising died?”

As advertisers got louder & louder since the golden age of radio and the early days of television, customers have gotten much better a screening-out those advertising messages. We’ve all thrown-away bulk mail unopened. We’ve all grown to glossing-over advertising in newspapers & magazines, and their sales have plummeted anyway.  I you have a DVR, you blow-past commercials without giving them a thought.  Anyone who is tech savvy at all hardly ever see ads on the Internet, they’re all blocked in the background; I’m not talking about email spam here either, I’m talking about web page ads, they’ve been blockable for years.

So, back the the question:

Has advertising died?

Bad advertising is dead…Good, I mean, “really smart” advertising is alive and well!

Do you read the Sunday circulars in the newspaper, heck, do you even read a newspaper–or do you glance at the Google News page and sometimes catch the evening news (skipping past the commercials)?

Let’s look at some traditional advertising venues and consider whether they’re reaching you…

Yellow Pages:

When was the last time you “let your fingers do the walking?” six months? a year?  When you’re shopping for anything where do you turn? Google shopping (aka Froogle)?  Amazon.com?  Ebay?  Remember when we used to go through the yellow pages calling store after store comparing prices?  I may have done that once in the past 10 years!  There is one single time when consumers are most likely to look for help in the Yellow Pages, that’s in an emergency; like a flooded basement, or a backed-up toilet. So, unless you’re a 24 hour emergency response service business, stop wasting any money on yellow pages.

Newspaper:

The next time you’re looking through a daily newspaper study the ads.  It won’t take long–there aren’t many.  You’ll see mostly automobile ads, because people still look for cars in the classifieds, which means car advertisers are still willing to purchase display ads for cars.  Theaters still advertise in the lifestyle section.  The remainder of the ads you will find are suspiciously “geriatric;” hearing aids, dentures, wigs, medicare supplement insurance & funeral homes.  Ouch!  Know your audience.  Most daily newspaper subscribers are retired.  If that’s your market, fine.

Marriage mailers, coupon envelopes & other circulars:

Most readers here are bargain shoppers.  Now if you run a close-out store, or have a genuine overstock or special purchase that you are trying to unload these are perfect.  On the other hand, if you’re trying to build repeat clientele, this is probably the single worst medium you could choose.  These are price shoppers, they have no loyalty whatsoever beyond today’s lowest bidder.  There is one other category of circular reader, the new resident who just moved into town and doesn’t know where else to turn for local sources.  Possibly helpful for the right merchant, like furniture, window treatment or flooring but still not good for upscale, repeat business.

Radio:

If done exceptionally well, this can work.  The vast majority of radio ads are worthless.  Talk radio is far and away the king of the field.  Background music radio at work is mostly ignored.  Even in cars, where you have a captive audience, music radio advertising is poor.  It’s far too easy to just push a different station button as soon as the ads start (I do it, you do too, don’t you?).  Talk radio listeners are accustomed to processing a voice message while driving or doing other tasks, they tend not to change channels because they’re listening to a program they like.  I wouldn’t do any radio advertising other than talk radio.

TV:

One word; “TiVo.”  If you have  DVR, like TiVo, you know what I mean.  If not, these set-top boxes that replaced VCR’s record TV programs digitally.  They allow you to skip back and skip forward, if you’ve paused or skipped back, you can instantly bypass a 30 second commercial with one single click of the remote.  Pause your favorite show long-enough to load the dishwasher and you can skip every ad in an hour-long show.  Television advertising is dead.

What about Internet advertising?  That’s new and different isn’t it?

Yes, but that’s a topic for another article, follow the link to the right.