DSA Online | New Media Updates

Last night I saw an ad on television promoting TV as a good advertising medium. This commercial could have taken many routes to demonstrate why to choose TV: wide reach, audience engagement, impact of visuals+sounds etc. However, it decided to go another way entirely – it showed, among other things, a dog pissing on a newspaper.

Wait, what?

Yup… A DOG PISSING ON A NEWSPAPER.

Perhaps you’ve seen this ad? Rather then highlight the strengths of TV ads, it displayed a number of reasons of why not to advertise in newspapers. Skipping right past the numerous fallacies in this ad I feel most people would recognize right away, I think that there is a problem here. It doesn’t factor in the lasting negative impact that these ads place on the industry as a whole.

There is a reason why the movie Transporter 2 was nothing more than a 90 minute Audi commercial and James Bond goes through more car brands then women. It’s the same reason so many teenage boys seem to like reeking of enough cheap body spray to choke a skunk. Marketing creates strong impressions over time, and the more we hear it, the more we believe it.

Let’s be honest, advertising doesn’t have the best reputation to begin with; we are the interruption during TV programs and the insidious powers that force consumers to spend until they are buried in debt. We are the defacement ruining hockey rink boards, and the reason everyone is so fat. Disagree? Too bad. This is how many people perceive advertising, and dogs urinating on newspapers isn’t going to help that perception. Constantly bombarding potential advertisers with reasons why radio, TV, newspapers, and the internet are bad advertising mediums is going to eventually start to sink in. If you take a negative perception and pile a bunch of negative ads on top of it, will anything good come from it?

As a media planner, I see advertising differently than what I’ve written above. I want to connect the right people with the right message. We live in a world with so many products and services consumers couldn’t possibly find most of what they need without advertising. I don’t want to beat you with a stick until you buy the product, especially if you’re a man and I’m selling tampons; I think we can all agree that’d be a waste of time and would ruin a perfectly good stick. What I do want to do is find the people that would want the product I’m selling and put the message out to them that I have something they will like or that they could use. I want to do it efficiently and at the lowest cost possible. To do this I want to use all the best channels available to me. This often means using a variety of mediums working together, not choosing one over the others. DSA Online (as the name implies) is here to make sense of online advertising solutions, but I’m not going to say that online advertising is better then other mediums. Online advertising offers new ways to reach certain consumers; sometimes it will be a better alternative to reach a market, sometimes it works best when combined with other mediums, and sometimes it’s not a good choice.