Video killed the radio star
Here’s a bit of a history lesson to point out how advertising mediums will evolve and the most forward thinking companies are the ones that survive and grow;
– When radio was first introduced in 1930’s many people thought it was the end of vinyl record sales (these are like download singles to you young pups out there!) as people could just listen to songs they like rather than having to buy them, and indeed there was a severe drop in profits in the US record sales from 75 million dollars to 26 million over a 9 year period , however what a lot of scare mongers failed to point out was that this was during a period of history when most of our males were off getting killed in a world war and the time of life was known as “the great depression” – so was this slump down to radio ?
– Fast forward to the 1950’s (the war is over now in case you didn’t like history) and in comes – the transistor radio , a little pocket radio that you could take out of the house
From here on in clever businesses decided to “advertise” on radio as they saw that this was a medium that was going to stay and transmit their business to a lot of people!
Then in 1981 someone threw a spanner in the works! It was a little broadcasting channel known as MTV – suddenly people didn’t have to just listen to music they could watch it! and advertisers saw the potential of it immediately – they could “show” their products and services to new customers instead of just telling them
So 5 years later in 1986 another television channel launched this one ONLY selling goods to people its called QVC. This company really saw the power of “showing”
So television had a good run of being the leader in the market for companies showing their goods and services both by having dedicated channels but also by “adverts” in between programmes but companies were always going to be looking for the next big idea, not least because the huge costs associated with television advertising meant that small/medium businesses could not compete with the big boys.
2 years later a little company decided to start up which would make as big an impact on consumers buying avenues as television did when it started, that’s right it was Google!
Google mission statement is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”,
It could just as easily have been “to allow all the companies that couldn’t afford to advertise on the telly the opportunity to compete with the big boys!” they could do this by having good visual content via a company website
Fast forward 17 years to 2005 and in comes you tube a whole medium dedicated to “showing” meaning that companies now had another avenue of engaging customers in the form of video (something that MTV saw the power of 24 years earlier just on telly instead of online!) with articles in 2008 projecting their advertising revenue at 200 million dollars – this really was a powerful medium for “all” size companies.
So what does a company need to do today to stay in front of the most amounts of customers?
- Simple have a good presence online in the form of a website that gets found and looks good
- Have good representation on a “search” website (I find yellonline a particular good one lol) Have a video that engages and can be found
- And have a printed directory advert because since 1976 when we started no one has invented any paid for advert medium that (As yet) has rivalled our cost per lead for small to medium business
So we know that internet won’t kill the video star, it will enhance it but we do have to ensure that internet doesn’t kill the radio star or more importantly the small and medium companies in the UK today that don’t have a proper online presence and aren’t moving with the times!
