Digital Advertising vs Print, TV, & Billboards

What Hasn’t Changed – The Creative Process

Advertising used to follow a fairly steady path from concept to execution, at least in terms of what you were creating, what you would do with it when it was done, and why you were doing those things in the first place. You’d get a brief from the client, usually with context and goals for the campaign...

We are CosmicSock, a sock company. We want to sell socks to young working men and increase our market share via a new product, the SockStar!

Sometimes the brief would include some research…

Our focus groups say that our preferred buying audience – young working men – cares more about price than quality or features.

… and maybe even some sort of directive or instruction…

Make the case that our product is perfect for our target consumer because it is more affordable!

Sometimes the brief would have tons of research, context, and information, and sometimes it would have none of that. Either way, the brief informed the work.

Then, a creative team would get to work and come up with ideas that addressed the brief’s elements. This could occasionally include gimmicky or wacky ideas, or sometimes big launch events (along the lines of what we think of today as brand activations), but the core elements didn’t change. The agency needed to have something to say, they needed graphical elements which helped them say it, and they had to have a plan for where and how to show that work to potential customers.

What Has Changed – Media & Measurement

As you might guess, not much has changed but the media and means of measurement. In the past, print, TV, radio, and out-of-home (e.g. billboards) represented the vast majority of the available universe for advertising. Now, thanks to digital media, that universe is much more varied and accessible to businesses of all sizes. You can still buy billboards and TV ads and radio ads (and their price profile hasn’t changed all that much), but you can also buy ads on digital media which focus their targeting and delivery on extremely specific audiences, and do so with great cost efficiency.

In some ways the work is very similar to what it has always been – meaning that the same level of care and expertise is required for digital advertising as for more traditional kinds of ads. A bad billboard is one that doesn’t work; a poorly built national magazine ad is one that doesn’t sell. The same is true for digital ads: a Facebook or Google campaign which doesn’t work is inefficient and wasteful, no matter how much cheaper it was to get it in front of a million people. So no matter what, the art, copy, and strategy behind an ad campaign still has to be good. 

Measuring Digital Advertising Efforts

While you could always get traffic reports or circulation stats from billboard or newspaper ads, the measurements for traditional advertising media, while improving somewhat as of late, have historically been fairly crude: we think this many people saw the ad, and our sales in the relevant quarter went up or down, and so that is how we’re judging the campaign’s performance. With digital advertising, the metrics and analytics available tend to be quite robust, allowing the opportunity to report on a campaign’s efficacy in much greater detail.

As a friendly neighborhood crime-fighter's uncle once said, with great power comes great responsibility. Since we can measure the ever-living hell out of what we’re doing, we should – and we should also make sure that our client understands what those measurements mean just as well as we do. This is not a simple clicks’n’calls list emailed each quarter, or some unexplained graphs in a PDF. Rather, this is a serious accounting of what happened and why, and what that means for what we’ll do next. Accept no substitutes. (And while you’re at it, take a look at the kind of monthly digital spend reports we send to – and go over with – our clients at Swash Labs.)

The basics of how advertising works have remained more or less the same for generations, but for a brand to be truly successful in the 21st century, digital advertising must be a priority. This effort requires a modern approach, a refined skill set, and a deep understanding of our current (and future) information environment.