Around the year 1886, the automobile hit mass production in the United States and Europe. Suddenly, ordinary people could own one. At this stage, horse drawn cart companies were alive and kicking. Imagine what it must have been like for those businesses that had been running for years. Can you conceive what it must have been like for those few decades while the changeover took place?

Perhaps some nimble minded carters saw the writing on the wall and immediately looked at trading their taxi-carts for a few automobiles. Even more might have realised that they were never going to compete with cars or understand them and sold up early. There must have been at least one who simply moved into cleaning and polishing cars. Another would have gotten an idea from the first car crash and possibly started a  “towing by horse” service. Sadly a great many of them simply ran their horse and cart businesses until hay became difficult to obtain. By the early nineteen hundreds, the well dried up completely.

The current situation in the marketing world bares resemblance to this scenario. Traditional advertising and branding in particular is going the way of the horse-drawn cart. On the flip side, digital media is consistently outperforming the “cart” in everything from PR to reporting, research and deliverable sales figures. What then must traditional advertisers do? There is nothing for it, they must evolve as some of the carters did.

Of course it isn’t fair to draw a direct parallel between the invention of the car and the rise of digital marketing. One could take the example of painting versus the first camera. When the camera came out around 1840, many feared that photography would kill the necessity for picture painting but it didn’t. Fine art simply moved away from portraiture and found a whole new purpose.

Similarly, there are many aspects of traditional advertising that won’t be completely washed away by the direct, PR driven approach of digital marketing. It will certainly change though. For the last few decades, large companies have pumped elephantine sums of money into their “marketing and branding”. There was no way of testing the affectivity of these campaigns but it was broadly understood that the “spray and pray” approach would work if you threw enough money at it.

Digital marketing offers statistics for every single step of the marketing and sales process. This has utterly floored those who may still believe that a bigger budget means bigger sales. The question remains though, where does that leave traditional advertising? More importantly, if it does evolve (and it really doesn’t have a choice) which direction must it take?

It is important to remember that none of the above is really news to anybody in the industry. The swan song has been going for some time and trend watchers aren’t fools. Advertising Industry magazines are trumpeting this information from cover to cover and there are literally thousands of articles to this effect online. People are not fighting the car but they seem to have turned their backs on the cart. This is a short-sighted mindset.

Traditional advertising has done some extraordinary things in the last century. It has opened the door to whole new realms of creative media (just take the timeless advertising posters by Toulouse Lautrec for the Moulin Rouge as an example). It has initiated a lot of research that has unlocked many revelations about human behaviour. Most importantly, it has proven that it is possible to find people to buy your product if you know where and how to look for them.

Let us not forget that every graphic designer, copywriter and developer probably owes at least a percentage of his job to this great white elephant. It isn’t clear where traditional advertising is headed but it deserves a nod. If digital marketing is Enrique Iglesias, traditional advertising must certainly be its daddy, Julio…

Sound Idea Digital specialises in Digital Marketing. For more information, contact

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