Traditional Vs Online Advertising

The difference between online advertising and traditional advertising is like night and day, and distinct in many ways. Digital advertising has a wider coverage and larger audience than traditional advertising and it allows users to target specific audience by age, sex, occupation, location, niches market. Users are also able to schedule campaigns, making it more effective to manage. In several other areas such as revenue generation, measurability, cost and target audience, online advertising produces higher ROI than its tradition counterpart.

What is Online Advertising?

Online advertising is a process whereby digital methods are used for the promotion of content on the Internet with the aims of driving traffic to an advertiser website. Thus, it helps to increase the sale of products and services. Traditional advertising, on the other hand is the use of the media - print, radio and electronic, as well as outdoor, such as billboards and indoor, which include banners, posters and other print materials and T-shirts, face caps, flyers etc.

There have been many arguments in favour and against these two methods in the areas of performances and effectiveness. Also, there are discussions around reach, measurability, cost and ease of execution. Traditional advertising has been in existence since the ancient days when signs were used as directions in caves and even in the early years of Christianity, when the apostles used the fish sign to provide direction to their worship places.

Advertising in Nigeria can be traced back to when traditional town criers used gongs and trumpets to announce events and market days in the rural communities. As for formal advertising, it started in Nigeria when UAC launched its publicity company, the West African Publicity Limited (WAP) in 1928, which then covered the whole of West Africa.

In 1965, the name West African Publicity was changed to Lever International Advertising Services (LINTAS) West Africa Limited, and it was Lintas that became the bedrock of organized advertising in Nigeria when it established the Advertising Practitioners Council of Nigeria (APCON),58 which was the first in West Africa.

Advertising in Nigeria has come a long way, and digital transformation and innovation has expanded the scope, thereby making it a global phenomenon, such that it would be quite a disservice to narrow scope of the discuss of advertising to Nigeria alone. Traditional advertising is experiencing immense disruptions as advertising agencies are looking for innovative ways to engage the public, and this has started changing the old ways of the practice of advertising to online methods.

Generally, advertising is a way of communicating with the public using either traditional or innovative digital methods, which include banner advertising, video advertising, search engine marketing and social media marketing. There is also affiliate marketing, content marketing, email marketing, and a long list of other digital marketing options. 

Source: Marketing Interactive 

In recent years, online advertising, which also falls under digital marketing, have shown greater performance in almost every available measurement indices used in the industry such as the following:

Target Audience

Online advertising has a wider coverage and larger audience than traditional methods, and it allows users to target specific audience by age, sex, occupation, location, niches market and it is possible to schedule such so that it is automated and more effective to manage. 

Cost

Traditional advertising is known to be far more expensive than online advertising, for example email marketing is thrice less expensive and six times more effective than traditional advertising. 

Measurability

It is more difficult determining the exact coverage or reach of traditional advertising, while on the other hand, online channels of advertising can be measure accurately with little or no additional cost. 

Impact

The impact of traditional advertising can be measured by sales or by reaction of the public either by phone calls, letters, emails messages, while online advertising has all of these and in addition, social media engagement such as comments, likes and share. These provide real-time reactions from the audience that allow you to measure the effectiveness of the campaign through analytics software. 

Return on Investment

The revenue from online advertising globally in 2018 totaled $557.99 billion, which is about 40% of the entire advertising revenue. In terms of advertising spend, online advertising alone has 38.3% over 61.7% of all the traditional advertising channels including television, newspaper, radio.59

Conclusion

Clearly, online advertising is the future of the industry, and one of the strong points that makes it the favourable method is that it cost far less, more effective, highly measurable and above all it is innovative.