Legacy Marketing

Legacy Marketing

Legacy Marketing includes things that have been around for more than 20 years … before the Internet became widespread – things like newspaper ads, TV ads, billboards, and radio ads. These traditional media options for advertising remain strong while undergoing huge changes. 

1. Advantages of Legacy- Demographics often decide for you whether to go with legacy or digital marketing. Traditional media outlets tend to perform better with older people. Traditional media can also address people who are online and people who aren’t at the same time. If you are needing to target a very wide segment of the population, traditional marketing may help you achieve that. 

2. Disadvantages of Legacy: Some of the weaknesses of these media have to deal with cost and tracking. Traditional media in most markets is still overpriced for the attention they deliver to advertisers. Digital is generally cheaper and faster to execute than traditional advertising. Lack of trackability with traditional advertising proves challenging. With digital, you can make your activity extremely trackable with URLs and pixels. Traditional methods lack these features. Also some of the legacy metrics they do use can be confusing or misleading. Just because a newspaper has 30,000 subscriptions does not mean that 30,000 people saw your ad. But when you hear 30,000 you tend to think that many people saw your ad. In some smaller markets, TV and radio ratings are controlled by journaled markets. This means they rely on humans to write out their viewing behavior to see how things are performing, which is not as accurate as a Youtube view. 

3. Future of traditional:
Two things will happen to legacy media in the future: 1. It is going to get cheaper. As the digital revolution rages on and the markets move away from focusing on traditional media, the cost per ad will need to decrease to be competitive. Over time, costs will decrease, making traditional advertising a better investment. The attention will match up with the cost. 2. For many of these media properties to survive they will get more digital in its capabilities like TV going digital and Newspapers turning into apps. Then it will make more sense to invest in those platforms as well.

This blog post is a portion of Attention and Action. The book walks you through the marketing process that Adelsberger Marketing follows with its clients. You can read this book for free as a blog on the Adelsberger Marketing website or purchase on Amazon.com.