Where is Advertising Heading?

Have you ever watched the AMC television series Mad Men?

Although it’s been on the air since 2007, I only started watching it in the last month via a DVD rental service.

As someone who grew up in the 60′s, watching the show brings back vivid memories of my childhood and early adulthood, recalling how women were treated in the workplace. However, what has intrigued me just as much is how advertising was done in the 1960′s, and how it has evolved over the years.

In the 60′s, advertising appeared primarily in 3 areas of media; radio, television and print. When internet technology exploded on the scene in the 1990′s, a fundamental shift started to occur. As more and more people got online, advertisers saw an opportunity to market products to the continuously growing population of prospects surfing the web.

DoubleClick, now owned by Google, was the first company who marketed advertising space on websites to companies wanting to expand their marketing reach. This was in the form of banner advertising, still in use today.

In the early years on internet advertising, most of it was done by online marketers as opposed to traditional brick and mortar companies, however as time went on, we all started to notice on television ads, the captions with the company’s website address so viewers could visit the site at their leisure to get additional information about a product or service.

Now, it seems that virtually every TV, radio and print ad has a reference to its website, giving online advertising true credibility. Print advertising, while still very popular, is slowly disappearing because print media, especially newspapers, are going out of business or shifting their operations primarily to online content.

With the development of popular search engines, such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing, advertisers saw a huge potential to reach their target audience. Enter the phenomenon of social networking, which is rapidly becoming a serious contender for advertising dollars. Sites like Facebook, Squidoo, and Hubpages not only offer targeted, low cost advertising, but individual members can use word of mouth to recommend products or services they like, support businesses who have established a fan page, even promote their own products/services or affiliate programs absolutely free.

Cell phone technology is already creating an extension of online advertising, with the advent of smart phone applications and text alerts. Advertising via cell phones will likely become the next big trend along with social networking sites.

Overall cost effectiveness, ability to target their prospects efficiently, international exposure make online/cell advertising the wave of the short term future. One can only imagine the marketing venues that will be common place in 20 years!