Traditional vs New Digital Advertising

In marketing, traditional advertising means print, TV, and radio. Digital advertising is not traditional advertising by today's standard. But I believe very soon we will have traditional digital advertising and new digital advertising. If it is not called "new", it could be "advanced", "rich", or whatever.

In my definition, traditional digital advertising include those marketers spend most of the time doing now – website development, banner advertising, web sponsorship, search engine optimization, keyword buy, video, etc. They are all one-way communication.

New digital advertising, on the other hand, is all about interaction – posting and soliciting feedback, listening and adjusting. Instead of branding banner, how about direct response banner? Instead of same information for all, how about adjusted content, tone, color, and layout for different web users? Instead of sending e-newsletter, soliciting contributions?

In fact, none of these ideas are new. They have all been done, not just recently but a while ago. Yet they are still uncommon. Is it because it requires very high-level technology? Not really. Very expensive? Bad creative costs the same as good creative. Very time consuming? Maybe, but mostly on education.

The main reason, I think, is that marketers are just like most of the human beings. They feel safer not to make changes. They feel more comfortable to give one-way message. It is too scary to hear from consumers. Why rock the boat when you see the boat is still moving? Well, because you want to get to places you want to be faster and before your competitors.