Online advertising overtakes tv ads

Looking around the news today I was tempted to comment on the switch of Sun support from Labour to the Conservatives. However I think there's been enough political comment from 2nd Head recently and as this would bring us back to issues of loyalty and trust, I couldn't necessarily say anything altogether inspirational on this topic!

The good news is that I did find an article on advertising that caught my eye. The headline relates to online advertising superseding tv advertising for the first time: up by 4.6% and totalling 1.752bn between January and July. Some impressive stats.

Quite as you may expect, much of this shift has been put down to the recession. Tv advertising is notoriously expensive and so it stands to reason that as belts tighten there would be an online shift. I am however in agreement with Thinkbox, the marketing body for the main UK commercial television broadcasters. In an admittedly not unbiased statement, it claims that tv vs. online can't act as a fair comparison. This is mainly because 'online' doesn't just encompass banners and podcasts, but all online activity, such as search engine optimisation, which arguably doesn't fall under the umbrella of 'advertising'.

Thinkbox also goes on to explain that the two mediums aren't mutually exclusive and should work to complement each other. Again, I am in agreement. It can be tempting to focus on one form of marketing as 'the new way' and soon find you've thrown all your eggs in one basket, when it's equally important to keep an eye on others areas.

A good example of this is my own thoughts regarding trade shows a few years ago. As someone who's worked in marketing for a while, I've doen my fair share. My fair share of lugging boxes; phonecalls of panic because plasma screens haven't arrived; phone calls of panic because sales people haven't arrived and so on. So you can imagine that seeing a downturn at a couple of successive exhibitions did cause (if I'm honest) a slight leap of hope. Was that it for exhibitions? Were the days of cart horsing around finally over?

Well, no.

There were indeed a few times that our leads started to plummet and in a relatively competitor friendly industry, as it was at the time, it seemed that our counterparts thought the same. We were generally in agreement that with so much available online, people were staying in their offices and finding everything they needed over the web. End of.

But as we soon found out, it just wasn't the case. Much as people like to browse the internet, they also like to be reached in other ways. It's why people don't just do their shopping online, it's why we still like to read the papers and buy magazines. Very few of us are one dimensional and even if we try to cut ourselves off from all the other mediums available, there's an extent to which we're always going to be exposed to forms of marketing that aren't online. That includes print advertising, tv ads, screens in the post office and so on. And exhibitions of course.

I'm pleased to say, grudgingly, that my last trade show for my previous employer (just this summer) was the best I ever experienced. Typical, you may say, but there was something wonderful about saying goodbye to all that hard work in such a positive, humming environment. Yes it was an incredible amount of hard work, but it paid off more than ever before. Even my most cynical colleagues were lauding the obvious effects.

Of course whatever older mediums you use, it's always important to monitor what you spend, to know who and how many are watching/reading/logging/clicking. But to ignore all traditional forms of marketing would be madness I tell you. Simply madness...