Marketing has changed so much in the past fifty years. In the middle of the century, there was very little in the way of anything except analog advertisements. By necessity, there were only physical signs, radio commercials and primitive TV commercials with little else to get the word out about products or services. Those with access to resources could make get a display board, a custom sandwich board, a real estate sign or otherwise but most people in business and marketing had to settle for what they could get. Aside from real estate signs or yard signs, there just wasn’t a good way to reach most people in a fast and massive way. If you wanted a yard sign you had to go to places with yard signs for sale, if you wanted to get a billboard you had to call up the companies that owned them and rent ad time. Nowadays the world is very different and people have had to adapt to the changing methods of marketing just as they’ve had to adapt to everything else. This adaptation sounds like it might be a chore but, honestly, today, it’s much easier to reach people than ever before. There are all sorts of ways to reach thousands or even millions of people about the products you provide and its easier to access all of these ways than ever before. Let’s take a few seconds and look at these new ways in an deeper context.
The Digital World and You
It’s safe to say by now that our world has undergone a digital revolution in the past ten years. Younger people might not quite remember but it wasn’t so long ago that the digital world was scary and new for most people. While it had been around for most of the eighties and nineties, it was only in the past ten years that people really took to moving many different parts of their lives online. Most marketing followed, of course, and now the business landscape has changed dramatically as a result. In today’s economy, if you don’t have at least some of your advertisements online, then it’s going to be really bad for your business. It depends on what you are buying and selling, of course. A smaller mom and pop store is by necessity going to require less online advertising than a big retail chain or a big brick and mortar store. If your a business that has yard signs for sale than you are going to have a very different business model than, say, someone who is selling a chain of lawnmowers nationwide. But for all businesses nowadays you at least need a website and a few pop up ads to really keep yourself afloat.
The Digital World in the Real World
The digital world might be currently contained inside the computer but that doesn’t mean other parts of it haven’t leaked out into the real world in strange and fantastic ways. For example, most analog billboards have been replaced by digital billboards that can change and cycle through several advertisements at once. Signage like this is important, because it helps show many many people about your brand, both foot traffic and a good amount of driver traffic. With the changing advertisements, too, this helps more brands get exposed faster with less turn over time in between. There’s also a matter of time of day, as well, a problem which many billboards without lights suffered from until the digital billboard came along and settled the issue.
Personal Advertisements
Digital billboards are all well and good but what does the future of digital advertising, whether in the real or virtual world, hold? How is it going to change in ten, twenty or even thirty years? How will the business that has yard signs for sale going to be different in the context of larger businesses? Well the business that has yard signs for sale is going to be moving in the direction of personal advertising as well the bigger businesses. We aren’t entirely sure what it will look like yet but personalized advertising is going to be big. That much has been clear from the outset.
