Early this month, I wrote about the declining economy benefiting online marketers and today I read an interesting post about offline advertising dropping as online advertising increases. Now, I know these two aren’t completely related, but there are similarities.
The article went on to say: “The revenues of offline publishers, particularly print publishers, have been dramatically eroded over the past ten years as their readers and advertisers have flocked to the Internet notes Richard Mullins, director at Acceleration.
According to Mullins, there is every sign that things are going to get even worse for print publishers in the years to come.
Analysts expect print advertising revenues to shrink by $42 billion in the US alone over the next ten years as advertisers shift to other channels, particularly the Internet. Although most major print publishers around the world and in South Africa have launched online products, most of them have failed to stem the hemorrhaging of revenues.”
Online Marketing Increases Rapidly!
It’s clear that a great deal of advertisers are moving from traditional offline media to online media and this has been happening since the whole web 2.0 boom occured. With fancy tools such as blogs, feed readers and socialable sharing, spreading news is a great deal easier online than it is offline, so none of this surprises me at all!
See, this is why TTL advertising (Through The Line) is such a big thing right now.
TTL incorporates online and offline (print and broadcast) and uses the entire marketing mix.
I seriously don’t see online replacing offline entirely, as no matter how web 2.0 savvy we get, there is is still a chunk of the population who cannot afford to get online. Even a massive drop will not totally kill print.
Mobile advertising and Out of Home (ie. billboards etc.) are also fairly strong.
So a good marketing campaign will have elements of online and offline, and will include publicity and advertising – brands are born with publicity and maintained through advertising.
It’s a pity though, smaller companies don’t have the resources to maintain a decent marketing campaign, and as more users shift to the online side of things, they will be missing out bigtime by only relying on a single medium.
Absolutely Rox, TTL advertising is the best way to go for sure, the tricky part is splitting the budget accordingly, a lot of research needs to go into that in my opinion.
Online will never completely replace offline, there are far too many people operating offline. Just checking email doesn’t really count as being an online user in my opinion.
Mobile advertising is getting large, being able to advertise across platforms such as MXit, fring, Yeigo, mig33 opens up the door to millions of users world wide!
It’s going to be interesting to watch how things change over the next years, all our guesses and wonders will be answered!