October 29, 2010
Advertising throughout the ages…fun stuff. I’m a student of advertising and how marketing has evolved and when I saw this video, I had to share it. After you watch it, I’ll give you some things that I’ve noticed and some tips on how to best use this new type of marketing so that your business can be successful.
A Review of Advertising throughout the ages
10,000 BC First Cave Drawings:
How I wish I was alive to have a pet dinosaur…
Basically cave drawings allowed for us to communicate when all we really knew how to do was grunt. Let’s see how different this post would be if all I could do is grunt.
Huhh hhoooh gggghhuuhhhh AAHGH
Alright alright, enough of that. No one but me can probably understand that what I just told you was the biggest secret to ever be released in a cave.
2700 BC Alphabet Invented:
Sweet, now we have all these cool letter’s so that we can communicate in a universal language. Now those grunts can actually turn into words and you then realize that my grunts really weren’t a secret, but me asking for you to buy me an iPad. If you want to, let me know because I’d be super happy 
The alphabet allowed for us to start communicating with one another and in turn start to barter and sell each other things. Oh, you killed a deer! Why yes, I would love some deer jerky here’s a dollar. I’d imagine this was probably not the first conversation, but you get the idea. People started selling things to others and trading.
1439 AD The Printing Press Invented:
Oh Johannes Gutenberg, thank you for this. You truly are a great man. You have allowed for more people to have access to books and have the ability to learn! As you may or may not know(you, not Johannes) I love reading and spend a great deal of my time learning so really I am grateful for Gutenberg’s invention. The printing press also allowed for advertising to take on a new platform! Now when you are looking through Maxim magazine, you can get sold cologne from Dolce & Gabbana (one of the cologne’s I wear).
The ability to put pictures onto paper was a great thing for businesses because now they can start to use leverage to grow their business! Nice!
Ahhh crap, this means that writing by hand is becoming less effective. Oh well, this is all part of evolution, right Darwin?
1920 AD The Radio Invented:
How about that, your now sitting in your house reading books and all of a sudden you start to hear sound coming out of a box in your room. What? How is that possible? Well, it happened and changed advertising once again. You can now talk into a microphone and then this sound travels through the air and ends up in peoples living room. This means that those people listening to the news can now be sold to! Awesome, cha-ching!!
After a while, everything changes once again…
1960 The Television Invented:
Oh crap, all that money your business invested in sending sound through the air is becoming less effective. People are now sitting on their butts watching pictures come up on this little box, WITH sound. Yep, you should give up now advertisers…Oh wait, you can evolve once again! This is great.
Testing has shown that when people see a picture of a product that is being talked about, it increases the conversion percentage for sales. This means that if you have a shiny red sports car, you can put a picture of it with some sound and sell more of them! This is awesome!
But, once again people change and something else happens…
1990 The Internet Invented:
BOOOOO!!! The internet has taken people off their couch and put them in a chair in front of a computer, this means we can no longer make as much money on TV ads. Let’s give up and go become hermits.
OR….we can learn how to use the internet to make sales! Awesome, this is possible!
The internet is actually a better medium for advertising than television because it allows for your prospective customers to interact with you and allows for your sales process to turn them into paying customers! More money? Yes!
Alright so how is this done? People are on the computer and hitting buttons now. They can easily just close out of that ad that we used to just put on tv. With the tv, at least the popcorn and beer was in the way of the remote. With the internet, the person already has one hand on the mouse ready to close anything that’s boring or annoying.
Did you notice what I said there?
Boring or Annoying…
That’s it! Advertising used to be so boring and annoying that people would have liked to turn it off or change the channel, but they didn’t want to miss the show when it came back on. This meant that more ads were seen, although they may not have led to sales.
What’s this mean to you?
This means you have to do something that you may not be comfortable doing. You’re going to have to make your advertisements engaging and FUN for your target market. This means that your traditional advertising brain is going to need to go on permanent vacation and your newly improved brain is going to need to come out to play. Woohoo!!! You should be getting excited this means you’ll have some more fun at work!
You need to figure out how to get your audience engaged in your advertising, maybe turn something into a game or a puzzle so that people interact with it. Provide an incentive for these people to participate, either offering a discount or priority shipping for free or a free consultation if you do that. Think of creative ways to get your customers excited about your product by standing out from the crowd. Do this and you WILL win.
If you want some creative ideas to market your business, you can hire me as a consultant to help get your brainstorming muscles working and help you find a breakthrough to help increase the response from your advertising and make more money!