Digital versus Traditional Advertising

Many of the novelty media show up and vanish quickly, and even the more stable media undergo constant changes. Significantly the product, competition, and market continue to witness dynamism so that each new advertising campaign requires a new look at media and the media plan.

The new wave of technology is unfolding as the fields of computers, consumer electronics and telecommunications blend together. The result is an explosion of new super gadgets and services that are already altering our lives. Information has gone digital; text, sounds and pictures are all being translated into the ones and zeroes that computers read.

Today’s analogue TV is giving way to digital video while advances in wireless technology and greater reach for high-speed data networks keep opening up new worlds of communication. The development of wireless communications is racing ahead and will eventually supersede and replace the fixed new worlds of communication networks soon (A. Leer 2000).

The greatest portion of all advertising money is spent in media, and the information and media industries rely heavily on advertising revenues. Any major changes in advertising spending figures will therefore affect the cash flows and levels of media output. How advertisers choose to spend their ad budgets should then be a major determinant in the shaping of the global media market.

Advertising agencies are scrambling to figure out how to adapt traditional ad techniques to the new digital world whereas there is a major dilemma: traditional advertising searches for a captive audience hooked by magazine or television show, but to advertise on interactive media means surrendering control to the audience.

The media industry in Nigeria is still unruffled because advertising spending patterns have yet to assimilate the impact of the Internet and other digital media platforms and the new forms of advertising. Advertising on the Internet for example is all about mastering the interactive communication with web customers and empathizing with people on what they want to do online. How do you do that with a powerless customer who does not even have a sincere platform for having his grievances redressed?

The digital world, characterized by connected consumers, brings many exciting opportunities for advertising. It is time our advertising agencies and their clients experimented with new methods and channels for advertising. How can they utilize cable networks, online information networks, online banking, interactive television, digital radio, multimedia games and the Internet?

Internet home pages (multimedia pages of information and advertising) can be used by advertisers as computerized brochures describing, in sum, the range of their services and occasional gimmicky promotions they might want to embark upon. The competition for advertising revenue in the face of digital media will certainly be fierce; advertisers especially in advanced societies are already basking in a world full of advertising space even as they thrive in a buyer’s market and the choices they make are already determining the funding of the media.

The digital market is also changing the style and presentation of advertising; advertisers now have so much information about their markets and access to myriad tools which aid them in collating knowledge about their individual customers. Advertisers utilize sophisticated customer profiles, making it possible for them to target customers with very specific advertising. Such ads are tailored toward individual interests, tastes and buying power.

In the digital world interaction between advertisers and customers are exciting; customer relationships are developed and carefully sustained. Over networks direct marketing can be convenient for customers especially if it is integrated with features such as automated ordering facilities, secure payment and delivery on demand. Companies from different backgrounds are also collaborating on joint advertising schemes in the digital world even as network advertising is integrated with the real product or service in entirely new ways.

The focus of advertising from individual product-pushing is being changed by interactive advertising to concept-building; advertisers are selling products and services with a view to supporting certain lifestyles, etc. The evolution of new and exciting types of advertising inevitably means that advertising agencies will have to come up with new skills and ways of working with clients.

Clients will need to be much more involved in the design and process of advertising and as such the relationship between the client and the advertising agency will invariably alter; they will have to get involved in each other’s business (J. Sodestrom 2000). Nigeria’s advertising agencies must challenge their ways of doing business; they need to develop innovative new ways to meet the demands of the digital marketing world. Why are brand “consultancies” suddenly springing up? Agencies must reclaim their rightful place as the brand steward!

At the turn of the 21st Century, Allen Rosenshine of BBDO Worldwide was asked to write about what American agency life would be like by 2005 and he predicted that an agency that expected to be living solely on traditional print and broadcast advertising would be stagnant. Branding should be a core competency that should remain the territory that classical agencies know best though e-commerce will change the models by which agencies’ clients do business.

At the end of this millennium, new media should help agencies improve on their creation of great brand building ideas. In spite of the dazzle of new technology, however, we all should not lose our primary purpose of communicating brand values to customers and consumers must stay at the forefront of managers’ minds (G. Randall 1999).