Advertising is not dead, it's just not King anymore

Google going onto TV is a bit of a landmark. For the world’s biggest brand to use the dinosaur of TV to push a product that is not moving as they are used to, is in many ways a the first battle won by the old guard in a war that has been all one way for quite some time. Google, perhaps more than any other entity, has been responsible for the shift in traditional advertising – adwords revolutionised how companies target their consumers and vice versa.

So for Google, who very proudly has been built ‘100% on word of mouse/mouth’, to make the about face of using TV smacks a little of desperation, which is unsurprising when their product, the web browser Chrome, is hardly on anyone’s desktop even a year after launch. Which is even more amazing when you consider that almost everyone has Google as their home page.

What this does show, is that the new media ‘digital revolution’ cannot be the best at everything. Traditional media is still a vital ingredient to ignite a campaign – many people still only perceive something as ‘big/serious’ if they see it on TV or read it in the paper – these mediums hold a physical gravitas that the digital world cannot compete with. And it still holds, that even the biggest, most creative and impactful digital or social media PR campaigns – think T-Mobile or Susan Boyle – only get truly huge when the traditional media pick up on them. Susan’s YouTube vid was pootling along quite happily at 2-3 million until the Daily Mail brigade picked up on her, then in turn the global media and Larry King Show – only then did it shoot into the stratosphere. It also speaks volumes that the biggest ever hit on YouTube is now a very normal, quite scary, middle aged woman who lives with too many cats – not a geek with a light saber. Posted by Graham