How has advertising changed over the past decade?

Question

I'm writing a paper and would really appreciate your help.

Answer 1

Before the internet, marketing for many, was more difficult, more expensive, and more time consuming. most of the metrics were gathered manually, by using surveys and polls among other methods. They also tracked trends based on what was purchased based on the specific advertising used, such as coupons. Advertising in its most basic form, word of mouth, was still the most effective and the most successful business owners were those who needed little advertising because they got plenty of repeat business and referrals by building relationships with their customers

When the internet became a popular way to market a product or service, many small business owners begin having grandiose thoughts of becoming a global business. They saw the overall potential instead of the relevant potential for their business, and thought globally, many before they even mastered their own neighborhood.

In 1998 I remember building a websites for existing small businesses whose goal was to sell their products globally through an ecommerce website, even before they had ever shipped a product to a customer before. Their site bombed not because it wasn't visually appealing, but their focus for their advertising was too wide for their business. They wanted to reach everyone regardless of whether they were a potential customer globally instead of focusing on finding the best customers and then building a relationship with those customers.

Today the internet offers better opportunities to widen your focus of your business while still being able to build relationships. Through social networking, list building, and blogs to name a few, you can keep a continuous dialogue with your current and potential customers. These are all great ways to keep communication going while widening your focus on who would be your target customers.

Answer 2

it has become more interactive. many companies (dove, doritos  to name a few), have held contests for consumers to develop their own advertisement.

also, internet marketing has become a huge outlet for advertising.

Answer 3

internet, cable tv, targeted marketing, so many ways.  tba

Answer 4

It depends on what kind of company it is and your purpose for advertising.  The Internet obviously opened up new areas of opportunities to start, promote, distribute and reach new business. Paid search advertising is now a large part of companies advertising budgets.

From the creative standpoint, less is more.  People are inundated with ads every day.  Todays advertising needs to be different from the pack, easy to understand and memorable.  I always hate seeing billboards with complicated imagery, messaging, and cluttered.  Basically, if it can't grab someones attention, have the reader understand and take meaning to the message in 7 seconds or less, you just wasted the money spent on that billboard.

Advertising today is about ROI.  Can it be tracked to properly determine your returns?  You see now websites on tv spots with a weird extension to the web address. i.e. acme.com/getitnow.  This is done to measure the effectiveness of this ad.  It is easy to track how many people accessed that page and can safely assume they heard it from the ad or someone refering them to the page because of the ad since you do not promote that url anywhere else and cannot be accessed other than directly.

The thing I hate most about marketing/advertising is that companies reduce their budgets for this when times are bad and increase when times are good.  It should be the complete opposite IMO.  Feel free to contact me for further discussions.