From TV Commercials to Google Ads: The Evolution of Advertising

The Internet has transformed all industries, and advertising is not an exception. Businesses have gone from giving out flyers about their new restaurant to making short videos about their products. If you were born in the generation of Facebook ads, you must have surely missed other types of advertising. Here is a look at the different ways to sell products.

1. Online Advertising

This first one is what you are most familiar with. This is just one advertising field, yet there is an endless list of types under it. In the past decade, the world of online advertising has seen rapid changes. It’s been of a series of one improvement after another.

The biggest one of them is Google Advertising. When you key in a search on Google like “how to get rid of acne,” the results page will show you these Google ads. For example, you will see that there are specific products at the top of the results page. Or maybe a link to a clinic’s website. Google ads are hard to miss. They also have the word “ad” in blue displayed on the top left corner of every result.

There is a whole industry dedicated to Google ads. You have probably encountered the term “Google Ads Specialist.” They are the people who help businesses launch effective advertising campaigns using Google. These campaigns should come with an optimized website that will show every potential customer what they are looking for right on the landing page. With this in mind, it’s crucial to optimize core web vitals to increase online visibility.

Then there are Facebook ads. These are the banners you see on your news feed. You usually see a “sponsored” tag on them. When you see an advertisement on Facebook, it means that you are part of the targeted list for that campaign. It could be related to your latest search, your location, your age, or your gender. Or a combination of all of them.

There are many other forms of online advertising that you have indeed seen.

2. Print Advertising

Before the Internet, print advertising was a big industry. It still is, but its popularity surely dwindled since most people spend their time on the Internet. It is also much cheaper to run online ads than to print physical copies on paper. A full page on the biggest newspaper or magazine was the object of competition for brands before. It meant that millions of people would see it. It would cost a fortune to have your ad printed on the center page of a magazine or the back cover of a newspaper.

And then, there are also the brochures, leaflets, and flyers. They are often referred to as small print media. These are the ones you see on the counter of a restaurant. Banks have these next to the deposit slips or on the table of a teller. Real estate companies print many of them to hand out to people at the mall.

If you keep getting letters in your email about specific products, that is a form of advertising that migrated online. Twenty years back, people would get these written letters in their mailbox.

3. Broadcast Advertising

The long commercial breaks you get on prime time TV are the most expensive form of broadcast advertising. This is probably the most annoying kind of commercial for every avid TV watcher. But you know, TV is business. And if you are wondering how free TV channels make money, this is through advertising.

This is why shows with the highest viewership ratings are the most expensive. More people will get to watch if they see it between breaks of their favorite Saturday night show. The same is true for radio programs. Although, it is much cheaper to advertise on the radio because you only need to produce an audio clip rather than one with visuals.

In TV game shows, participants get their prizes from a specific brand. It could be a sporting goods company or an airline. These show sponsorships are a form of TV advertising.

Then, advertising is also a thing in the big screen industry. You might have caught the main character drinking the same brand of beer for the whole duration of the movie. This practice is called product placement. This is a specific type of stealth advertising used in movies. You don’t feel like you are being advertised to; you just think that all the cars in the show are from the same manufacturer, which is normal.

Final Thoughts

As long as there are still TV shows and magazines, advertising forms outside the digital realm will never cease to exist. If you look into these forms of advertising, they are actually pretty interesting.

The post From TV Commercials to Google Ads: The Evolution of Advertising first appeared on Promark Business Solutions.