Put on your seatbelt because 2011 will be a wild and crazy ride for advertising. Actually, it should be quite exciting as well as cost effective. Print and traditional broadcast advertising is definitely in our rear view mirror. Almost all advertising will be focused towards drawing customers and prospects to the website to create a more engaging environment. This will allow advertisers to create commercials that have more edge, are weirder/freakier or are down right bizarre. The spots will be distributed to multiple outlets, which include but are not limited to specific audiences, Facebook pages, Twitter or simply posted on YouTube.
Advertising will more closely integrate with social outlets. As opposed to the world broadcast, which means to reach a wide audience, which is far more costly, it will transition to narrow-casting. Specifically, advertising will become more one-to-one communications than one-to-many. A great example of this was the Old Spice campaigns that aired in the summer of 2010. These new approaches will allow customers and prospects to become more engaged with the advertisers, which will create a positive impact on increased sales.
More importantly, these new vehicles are extremely cost effective. The big media buys will be used by those advertisers that have large customer groups across a variety of groups where a single message to many may still work in a traditional kind of way. However, these media buys have become ridiculously high, with little or no tracking vehicles to measure responses and therefore generate a low return on investment. The technology is now available to customize messages to narrow target groups or even subgroups. This will allow your target audience to become more engaged with the product or service. The advertising message can then be re-purposed/customized to additional target groups. And the media costs are drastically lower with highly sophisticated tracking mechanisms to analyze response rates which can be modified almost instantaneously. All of this will help increase the return on investment for advertisers.