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Effective Advertising Workshops Newsletter

Volume V Issue 1

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January/2011

Dear Reader,

We don't usually get in the prediction business, but 2011 could be the year of the wall-eyed duck.

There are not only indications, but facts are beginning to emerge that will make us all stop and think for a moment. It is generally agreed that Comcast's purchase of a majority interest in NBC will shake up the cable/television/video delivery system.

In 2008, what are chances that if you would have said "by the end of 2010, there will not be any Pontiac, Hummer or Mercury automobiles; Blockbuster and the Movie Gallery will be gone; A & P grocery stores will not exist; and no more Newsweek magazine"? You would have been labeled a lunatic.

Changes are coming...

Whether these changes are good or bad depends on how we adapt to them. But, ready or not, here they come.

1. The Post Office. Get ready to imagine a world without the post office. They are so deeply in financial trouble that there is probably no way to sustain it long term. Email, Fed Ex, and UPS have just about wiped out the minimum revenue needed to keep the post office alive. Most of your mail every day is junk mail and bills.

2. The Check. Britain is already laying the groundwork to do away with checks by 2018. It costs the financial system billions of dollars a year to process checks. Plastic cards and online transactions will lead to the eventual demise of the check. This plays right into the death of the post office. If you never paid your bills by mail and never received them by mail, the post office would absolutely go out of business.

3. The Newspaper. The younger generation simply doesn't read the newspaper. They certainly don't subscribe to a daily delivered print edition. That may go the way of the milkman and the laundry man. As for reading the paper online, get ready to pay for it. The rise in mobile Internet devices and e-readers has caused the newspaper and magazine publishers to form an alliance. They have met with Apple, Amazon, and the major cell phone companies to develop a model for paid subscription services.

4. The Book. You say you will never give up the physical book that you hold in your hand and turn the literal pages. I said the same thing about downloading music from iTunes. I wanted my hard copy CD. But I quickly changed my mind when I discovered I could get albums for half the price without ever leaving home to get the latest music. The same thing will happen with books. You can browse a bookstore online and even read a preview chapter before you buy. And the price is less than half that of a real book. And think of the convenience! Once you start flicking your fingers on the screen instead of the book, you find that you are lost in the story, can't wait to see what happens next, and you forget that you are holding a gadget instead of a book.

5. The Land Line Telephone. Unless you have a large family and make a lot of local calls, you don't need it anymore. Most people keep it simply because they've always had it. But you are paying double charges for that extra service. All the cell phone companies will let you call customers using the same cell phone provider for no charge against your minutes.

6. Music. This is one of the saddest parts of the change story. The music industry is dying a slow death. Not just because of illegal downloading. It's the lack of innovative new music being given a chance to get to the people who would like to hear it. Greed and corruption is the problem. The record labels and the radio conglomerates are simply self-destructing. Over 40% of the music purchased today is "catalogue items," meaning traditional music that the public is familiar with. Older established artists. This is also true on the live concert circuit. To explore this fascinating and disturbing topic further, check out the book, "Appetite for Self-Destruction" by Steve Knopper, and the video documentary, "Before the Music Dies."

7. The "Things" That You Own. Many of the very possessions that we used to own are still in our lives, but we may not actually own them in the future. They may simply reside in "the cloud." Today your computer has a hard drive and you store your pictures, music, movies, and documents. Your software is on a CD or DVD, and you can always re-install it if need be. But all that is changing. Apple, Microsoft, and Google are all finishing up their latest "cloud services." That means when you turn on a computer, the Internet will be built into the operating system. So, Windows, Google, and the Mac OS will be tied straight into the Internet. If you click on an icon, it will open something in the Internet cloud. If you save something, it will be saved to the cloud. And you may pay a monthly subscription fee to the cloud provider.

In this virtual world, you can access your music or your books, or your whatever from any laptop or handheld device. That's the good news. But, will you actually own any of this "stuff" or will it be able to disappear at any moment in a big "Poof"? Will most things in our lives be disposable and whimsical? It makes you want to run to the closet and pull out that photo album, grab a book from the shelf, or open up the CD case and pull out the insert.

8. Privacy. If there ever was a concept that we can look back on nostalgically, it would be privacy. That's gone. It's been gone for a long time anyway. There are cameras on the street, in most buildings, and even built into your computer and cell phone. But you can be sure that 24/7, "They" know who you are and where you are, right down to the GPS coordinates, and the Google Street View. If you buy something, your habit is put into a zillion profiles, and your ads will change to reflect those habits. And "They" will try to get you to buy something else. Again and again.

OK, this is our new world. But most of us also live primarily in the world of marketing and advertising. We feel that seismic changes are also going to occur in this arena also. This will affect the way we market and advertise our products and services for years to come.

Generally speaking, and in no certain order, the major media are: Television (both broadcast and cable), radio, newspapers, billboards, yellow pages, mailers and the internet. We have covered these in our seminars for seven years. In 2011, we are making major changes to our seminar, because, there are major changes in the media.

Newspapers and yellow pages will soon cease to exist. Newspapers all over the counter are either bankrupt or out of business and almost all newspapers are delivering a digital edition with nowhere near the advertising weight they had 10 years ago.

Radio is fighting their own battle with the MP3 player that every person between the ages of 4 and 34 seem to have with an average of 894 songs per player and earphones that can deliver music in a decibel that can rival 18-wheeler airhorns.

The yellow pages people are stopping delivery of the directories all over the country and "directing" their advertisers to the internet where the folks are looking.

The billboard folks are crying also. Their fabulous invention, the digital/LED boards, are being taken down all over the country as states and cities decide that they are dangerous for drivers because they are so distracting.

So what are we left with? - broadcast television, cable television, and the internet. We will concentrate on these three media in our seminars and feel that that's where you should be also.

A combination of these can brand your business and help you to grow. We will be spending a lot of time going over how to do this in the coming months.

Feel free to tell us about your success (or failures) and we will share that..... anonymously, of course.

Be sure to check our web site www.effectiveadvertisingseminars.comand see how people just like you put our program to work for them.

We hope to see you at a seminar this year.

Sincerely,

Larry Kirby

Effective Advertising Workshops

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