How Media Delivery is Changing
By Joel Black on 01/11/2011
I was reading through my RSS feeds and ran across a really interesting picture and article. The article was about the death of the billboard, which oiled some wheels and really had me thinking. I cant remember the last time I read a billboard. And living in Atlanta driving I-285 and I-85, I spend a lot of time directly in front of them. So it raises the question, is it really dead?
Today we are all so caught up on 2 way communication, using Twitter, Facebook, Linked in and all the other social networks, whats happening to the 1 way communications? In Georgia, we even had to make it against the law to text and drive because people were texting and on the networks rather than paying attention.
Now i’ve never rented a billboard, but the author of the article was paying 6k per month for this particular billboard. And a billboard just down the street was renting for 30k per month. Being in the marketing and social media world, I could provide much better results through social media and networking events with a 6k monthly than this billboard could.
Now I think some one way media may still be appropriate, such as magazines and newspapers, but I am not so sure the billboard is the media of the future. But if thats the case, why would these large companies be waisting money shouting at people from a 100 foot tall billboard. Maybe a more efficient way to use a billboard would be to direct people to the social network of a company where they can there join the discussion. Toyota does a good job at this with their commercials. They direct users to their YouTube page to see more commercials and learn more about the products.
So in my opinion, ditch the billboard advertising and invest in optimizing your website and social networks. You can find a good company to manage your social networks for about $1000 per month, spend a couple hundred on pay-per-click and put the savings in the bank.
