18TH NOV 2015
Let us start with a fundamental question: Is advertising even relevant as a factor in sales today? The answer is a resounding yes. Even the largest companies and the biggest products benefit from advertising. That’s because advertising allows us to spread our message to the most amount of people at once, rather than individually. This frees up our time so we can meet potential customers, innovate within our processes or products, or simply run our business without having to worry about sales.
Even if advertising doesn’t translate into an immediate spike in sales, it is quietly doing its job of building the brand in the public eye, positioning it, giving it a personality, humanizing it and keeping it visible. Online Advertising thus places your product in the consideration set of the potential buyer, and that is half the battle won.
A New Revolution
Advertising has evolved from time to time. From the loud verbal pitches of street vendors to posters, to print ad in newspapers and magazines, to radio ads, to television ads – the advertising industry has seen one revolution after another. This article is about the latest such revolution – internet advertising. As we shall see, this latest revolution is as vast as the internet itself.
Almost a quarter-century ago, in 1994, the World Wide Web was in its infancy, and a new company called Yahoo had just created something called a ‘search engine’ – a way to look for sites on the Internet. In the same year, Hot Wired became the first online magazine to carry advertisements in the form of colorful banner ads that looked like hoardings. These were the world’s first banner ads, and about 10 percent of those who saw the ads clicked on them. These people were then taken to the sponsor’s Web site, and advertising’s new age had begun.
Today, Internet advertising is much more sophisticated, and pervasive, with powerful capabilities to deliver cutting-edge graphics, to target the precisely correct audience, and to measure results instantaneously.
Baby Steps
Even today, many experts believe that Internet advertising is just taking baby steps, and that in the future we will compare today’s internet ads with the first television ads – where people – usually attractive ladies – walked across the screen carrying a sign that pitched the product, or we had a visual version of a radio ad – often called a talking heads ad. These were near-literal translations of hoardings and radio ads and they did little more than set the previous forms in motion.
But television ads evolved to give us a revolution in the art of visual storytelling as well as an entire range of special effects. Similarly, profound revolutions are taking place today, thanks to internet advertising.
Fundamental Shifts
In the old school of advertising, somebody made a popular TV show or a magazine and thus created a dedicated audience of particular demography. Marketers then took advantage of this by running their ad. Today, through internet advertising, we can identify and reach our customers rather than having them come to us.
Also, effectiveness data was provided to advertisers (in the offline realm) in the form of monthly or quarterly reports. Today, one can get these results immediately, and thus can fine-tune their online ad campaign in real-time.
So Where is it All Heading?
Just a few years ago, online advertising made up about a quarter of the $500 billion global advertising business, and it has been rising fast ever since. Some of this century’s most powerful companies, including Google, have emerged on the back of it.
Digital Advertising Today is Gaining Thanks To Three Important Trends.
A catalyst for small businesses to reach the horizons and an accelerating gear for an established business to keep on the path,
“Properly practiced reativity can make one ad do the work of ten,” said Bill Bernbach, a legendary ad man.
Recently Tata Motors changed the name of its car from Zica to Tiago as Zica sounds similar to the deadly virus Zika. It’s a timely business decision that reminds one of candy.