History of the past 100 years of advertising.

Whether your small business is based solely on the web, or if you have a brick and mortar store where you sell your goods and services it is extremely important to understand how technology has influenced successful marketing campaigns over the years. 

Ready for your history lesson?

Let’s start with radio. The first radio advertisements were simply announcements that benefited the owners of the stations. No money ever traded hands, however it didn’t take long until savvy business owners took advantage of this new medium. In 1922 Remik’s Music Store (based out of Seattle, WA) sponsored a program on KFC, a radio station that was partly owned by a Seattle based newspaper. Remik’s sponsored the radio show by promoting the program with large ads in the newspaper and invited people to buy songs that were just performed. Radio ads proved to be very effective compared to advertising in print alone, and even more so when owners combined both print and radio advertising. Soon, local DJs started to build reputations with their audience. Their listeners purchased the products or services that were mentioned by the on-air celebrity. Later, professionally produced spots included sound effects, background music, dialogue with numerous personalities, and jingles became an effective way of advertising to listeners. Studies showed that the quality of the commercials was just as important as the number of ads that they heard.

Television gives radio a run for it’s money. The first television advertisement was for a 20 second Bulova spot before a baseball game between the Brooklyn Dodgers and the Philadelphia Phillies. It displayed an image of a clock superimposed on a map of the United States accompanied with a simple voice over that said “America runs on Bulova time.” (For anyone keeping score, the Phillies beat the Dodgers that day by a score of six to four). It wasn’t until 1990 until advertising on television became affordable to small businesses. Personal computers had advanced to the point where local broadcasters could use them for video production on local cable TV stations. Unlike radio, advertisers could represent their brand visually as well as with sound. Some ads, such as the Winston cigarettes commercials became so popular they ran for 20 years.

Television is still the dominant advertising medium today, Even though 50% of all TV homes will use a DVR by 2016, most viewers are still watching commercials. In fact, DVRs actually increased the rating for commercials by 44%. 

Internet now competes with radio, and television. Prodigy, a company owned by IBM and Sears, ran the first advertisement on the internet and promoted Sears products  in the early 1980s. Prodigy even ran advertisements for AOL, which one of Prodigy’s direct competitors. Global Network Navigator was the first commercial web publication offering clickable advertisements which we all know as banner ads. Internet advertising has grown to include many forms of advertising such as:

• Search engine result pages: Probably the most popular form as everyone is familiar with Google’s textually relevant ads

• Rich Media Ads: These are ads that have video and/or audio. They are typically using Adobe’s Flash technology, but ads written in HTML 5 are starting to appear as well.

• Social network advertising: If you use Twitter, then you’ve probably seen companies talking about sales, coupons, or just bringing their followers up to speed. The same is done on Facebook as well.

Internet advertising is getting more and more popular. Internet advertising revenues hit  record spending amounts in 2011. This is partly because affluent persons are actually using the internet more than television. Internet based advertising is only going to increase, especially when companies like Hulu are able to provide valuable free content.

What else is out there? There are literally thousands of different advertising ideas that you can use for your small business. You will need to base your decisions on your demographic, and what you are able to offer to your customer. Sometimes a special niche form of advertising might provide you with the results you are after. For example, a travel site might want to advertise on the mini-TVs in metropolitan taxis because that is the demographic they are trying to attract, or an smartphone case maker may want to advertise on a smartphone app because they can target customers that only have smartphones.

America has a love and hate relationship with advertising. It’s up to you to ensure that you stay loved.

For more information on how Tonangi Design & Media can create a website or produce a video for business visit www.tonangi.com

 Vinod Tonangi | www.tonangi.com | phone: 201.252.7265 | fax: 619.566.4043

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Combine Guerrilla Marketing with Traditional Advertising Strategies

Most small businesses don't have advertising budgets that allow them to spend tens of thousands of dollars a month, but most advertising solutions require about $10,000 a month to gain any effectiveness. Take Google Adwords for example. When it first started it was fairly cheap costing only a few thousand dollars a month to get quite a few customers to your website. While this did not directly influence sales this did mean more traffic, and with more traffic you can usually expect more sales. Then Google changed their pricing strategy and large companies starting taking advantage of Google Adwords. Since Adwords is a bid-based pricing product the more companies that used Google Adwords the more expensive it becomes to get even one click. Unless you have a product that has very little competition it would be pretty difficult for you to spend a few thousand dollars and gain enough customers to make it worth your time managing your Google Adwords campaign.

Then small businesses moved over to using social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, but now that so many other large companies are using it to advertise their products and services, real users of these sites now view the majority of company accounts as spam and rarely even visit or read any of the information that is posted. 

With the recession decreasing the amount of customers that usually are willing to pay for your product or service it may seem like small businesses have no other alternative but to give up. Many small businesses already have, but there is hope because there are other solutions for small businesses to use. 

Small businesses can combine guerrilla marketing with traditional advertising strategies to gain exposure, and acquire paying customers. Let the current technology work for you instead of against you. It's amazing how many small businesses contact me for television commercials but don't yet have a website. In this day and age you can create a website with little or no technical knowledge, and place photos, videos, and other information so people can get the information they are looking for. If you don't want to do it yourself there are literally hundreds of thousands of web developers all over the world that can create one for you very cheaply. Personally, I recommend NY Web Design. However, this is only the first step. A website simply contains information about your product or service, but if no one knows about your company then it will never be visited. 

Many customers ask me to create videos under 3 minutes in length to post on their site, as well as other video sites such as YouTube, Viddler, DailiyMotion and countless others. This creates exposure for your company on sites where millions of people are already watching hundreds of millions of other videos. These sites are free to join and even offer sponsorship opportunities to increase your exposure.

This strategy works quite well, because video results on YouTube tend to show up before other Google search results. This means you don't have to spend all that money on SEO (search engine optimization). You can simply create a video and upload it to ten or twenty video sites and when people search for your keywords they will watch your video and get to your website where they can then contact you, or purchase your product right online.

Creating a video does not have to cost a fortune. In fact, Tonangi Media has reduced its prices in an effort to help small businesses remain in their marketing budget. For more information on how Tonangi Media can create a video for your small business please visit our website at www.tonangi.com

 Vinod Tonangi | www.tonangi.com | phone: 201.252.7265 | fax: 619.566.4043

<< Back to www.tonangi.com

Video is changing the face of the web.

There is no doubt that video is becoming more and more popular on the web. Every minute, 10 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube and even though YouTube is the world's most popular online video community, it’s not the only website that is utilizing video. If you sell products or services online, and you don’t have a video product tour that describes your offering - your viewers will go to a competitor that does.

In a recent white paper made available for download, by Adobe they noted that:

"We are clearly on the cusp of a major video trend and progressive marketers are starting to use video in ways beyond the obvious product video demonstration. Video can be leveraged to engage shoppers and provide an added value—value that may mean the difference between a shopper choosing your site as the final destination, or continuing on in pursuit of more information.... Products featured in videos outperform products that are not."

Simply put, customers feel more comfortable purchasing on your website if they have seen a video discussing the product in detail. Of all online retailers surveyed 43.3% have said that they plan to add video or streaming media to their website to increase their sales.

Here are just a few interesting statistics that may put things in perspective:

• 36% of Web retailers have already deployed product and education videos on their websites, and 53.3% expect to do so within a year
• 66.8% of U.S. marketers plan to focus their online marketing budget on video

One of the greatest benefits of creating video product and service tours is that the video can be seen on hundreds of other websites, not just your own. These videos can be uploaded to YouTube, Yahoo Video, Google Video, DailyMotion, Viddler, Veoh, Revver and countless other sites. By uploading your product videos on these sites you can increase your brand awareness and exposure without spending a dime on advertising. There are also sites that cater to niche markets, like this one that caters to the Real Estate market. By uploading your videos on these sites you will also organically improve your SEO which will increase your search engine page ranking. Customers that search for related keywords will see the video and will go on to your website to find out more information. However, utilizing video does not stop there.

Thousands of premium publishers like CNN.com, Hulu.com, ABC.com New York Times.com, CBS Sports.com, NCAA.com, and MTV.com utilize pre-roll and post-roll video advertisements between their video clips. With 81% of the total US internet audience watching online video, advertising with video has never been so appealing.

If you are interested in creating a video to advertise your product or service on the internet or on television, please visit www.tonangi.com for more information.

 Vinod Tonangi | www.tonangi.com | phone: 201.252.7265 | fax: 619.566.4043

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