Is Traditional Advertising Dead?

I’m sure you’ve heard that traditional advertising is dead. Why waste your money on print, TV, billboards or direct mail? All that matters now is the Internet and inbound marketing. All you have to do is build a website, toss in some keywords, launch an Adwords campaign and the next thing you know, the phone will be ringing off the hook.

…Not exactly.

It’s more important than ever to build a comprehensive advertising strategy that leverages the best that print, TV, outdoor, direct mail, pay-per-click, blogs, search engine optimization, social media, email marketing and/or other non traditional vehicles have to offer. The Internet isn’t eliminating the usefulness of traditional advertising… it’s amplifying the need by offering new ways to integrate a call to action. Now you don’t have to go straight from print ad to purchase. You can cycle a customer through your purchase path and continuously engage them. We broke this down further in our push/pull marketing strategy post.

The focus of this post will be on creating effective advertising. We’re going to delve into a few key principles to keep in mind if you want to create great advertising. These principles apply to companies large and small. We use the exact same guidelines for Fortune 500 clients as we do for single store retailers.

1. Define the purpose of your ad campaign. Who are you trying to reach, how are you going to reach them, what do you want to convey to them, why should they care about what you have to say, what are you trying to get them to do (call to action), how are you going to track the response and what emotion do you want to invoke? To me, the last element mentioned, emotion, is one of the most important for creating great advertising. The other elements are crucial for successful advertising, but emotion is powerful. Laughter, guilt, jealousy, excitement, pride, anger, camaraderie and joy can all be persuasive. Most of the great campaigns in advertising history utilize emotion to differentiate from the advertising clutter and make a consumer connection.
2. Don’t think of creating an ad, think of a building a campaign. Plan a strategy and select a direction that could grow beyond being an ad and into a memorable campaign. A campaign presents a unified message over a series of ads (same and different media). Campaigns have the potential to run for months, years and even decades if they are truly scalable. Spend the time and money to develop a thoughtful and unique campaign. It will be worth it when you’re not back at the drawing board in a month thinking what you should do for your next ad. One ad can be good, but a campaign can be great.
3. Don’t copy your competitors. If you’re basing your advertising strategy on what your competitors are doing… you’re screwed. The only reason to know what your competitors are doing is so you can clearly differentiate with your creative strategy. Nothing great has ever been built by copying someone else. Building your own unique campaign is the difference between being ‘that guy’ and ‘the guy.’ Meaning, ‘that guy’ always copies what everyone else is doing and is always a step behind the latest trends. Whereas ‘the guy’ is the one introducing what is hot and dictating the direction of everyone else. People actively follow ‘the guy’ and avoid ‘that guy.’
4. Include a call to action that can be measured. Data is your friend. The more you know about how people are responding to your advertising efforts, the easier it is to continuously adjust your efforts to be more efficient and effective. We’ll go deeper into this subject on an upcoming post.

Seen any great campaigns lately? Please do share.

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