Advertising is Harder Than Ever in Modern World

Ah, the "Good old days" of advertising are long gone - and this has made advertising a few orders of magnitude harder than it used to be.

How? "Back when" there were three television networks, a few independent TV channels and maybe 10 radio stations in a large city, two major daily's and three to four local weeklies to worry about for a local market. Then there were truly public bulletin boards (in Post Offices!) you could put up flyers and maybe the town hall.

To get the word out was easy. There were a limited number of places people could find out information and so they COULD find information in those limited locations. And press releases were harder to distribute so there were less so yours had a good chance of at least being seen. No PRWeb.com, 24-7PressRelease.com, PRLeap and a slew of others.

In the modern world it is no wonder that Google, Yahoo, TV, Radio stations, all have more ad revenue now - you have to advertise in a few hundred locations to cover the SAME amount of territory as you did 40 years ago!

You cannot post on public cork boards - almost all have been removed due to lawsuits over "free speech." A government cannot stop the posting of flyers that the community does not want to see so the government therefore banned community boards to avoid free speech suits when they disallowed certain posts. Note: PRIVATE firms - including publicly traded companies - can ban such posts - but when they get sued by the banned posting groups the resulting publicity is unwanted so they too have dropped bulletin boards.

When I try and advertise for the Oregon Chapter of the 8th Air Force Historical Society the quarterly meetings I spend around 5 hours to go to various newspaper web sites to post the meeting notice, e-mail notices to newspapers (who never acknowledge that they got it let alone if they are going to put it into the community meeting notice page), drive around putting up flyers in the few places that allow them. I have never gotten the meeting announcement read by a radio station in the public service announcements time slot. The best I have achieved was getting a TV crew to show up at one meeting which co-in sided with the anniversary of the end of WW II in 2005 which co-in sided with a attempt to move the 123rd Fighter Squadron out of Portland -- so the CO was at our meeting - hence the crew.

With people picking and choosing the web feeds that they get - and with so many sites in a local area - you really have to advertise on all of them also. Doing each one individually is really time-consuming hence the Google / Yahoo display ads and their advertising stream increase. Now to do this in order to sell a product is a full time job for multiple people. A small business cannot do this - no time - so they have to really contact out the work to advertising firms. With so many fragmented locations you have to advertise at to even get a reasonable amount of sales to cover the cost and get a profit is more of an art than a science.

To me, the "information revolution" is actually causing a loss of awareness of what is going on since people are now narrowing their information sources to many specific disparate sites, and methods of delivery, results in "getting the word" out to a wide audience is becoming impossible.

There are so many "information filters" built into the modern world people are becoming information islands - they know what exists in their own little area but are ignorant of what is happening elsewhere by the filters they put in place.

Think about it.