Advertising in the Age of Social Media

The qualities I admire (like simplicity and focus) are now actually crucial for advertising and marketing on the internet. I read about an Advertising Agency that practices this with their clients.

They market themselves as an agency that was created in the digital age - so they are not tied to traditional ways of doing advertising. Even their website is designed around focused simplicity, rather than using fancy graphics.

In the old days, there were only a few TV channels. TV, radio, and newspapers did not have to compete with internet surfing, podcasts, or interactive online games. People had longer attention spans. You could advertise in the mass media and reach a lot of people. You wanted general campaigns that used a lot of flash.

Now, audiences are fragmented because specialized cable channels and websites cannibalize each other. Instead of trying to reach a lot of people with a mainstream commercial, the best way to reach people is to create targeted commercials and run them in these different niche media outlets - including social media.

Also digital media is now interactive, and gives advertisers the tools to track the effectiveness of campaigns.

In this new environment, if you use a standard Advertising Agency that uses the old techniques, your advertising won't be as effective as it could be. For example, you would not want your agency to create bland, generic advertisements that are not targeted to anyone in particular, and then try to run them on different channels.

Instead, this ad agency would probably create an ad that appeals, for example, to fans of cooking shows and run that on the cooking channels. They could create another commercial for home and garden channels, etc.

The ads would be designed to go viral through social media.

This particular agency would also use online tools to track traffic and conversions for online advertising.