Business Services

Political Advertising: Traditional Versus New

By Ted Dhanik 

Traditional political advertisements reach out to a wide variety of consumers through various networks that reach a large amount of people. This includes television, radio, and newspapers. With the advent of the web, however, a very different version of marketing has come into play: display marketing.

With online marketing, the ads must be geared toward the people who are browsing the site that the business pays to be on. Therefore, it is a very specified type of persona that the ad is created toward. This alters everything about the marketing. It can now be geared toward specific issues, such as posting a politician’s position about animal rights on a pet store website. It can focus local elections and local issues to the people in the area. This is vastly different than traditional marketing, which is very broad and specified to what the politician wants to say, not what the voter is interested in listening to.

Display marketing also contains the ability to tip the scales in the political race  in a way that traditional marketing could not. For example, when a traditional ad is played or heard, if it is overplayed, the voter has an opportunity to navigate away from it. With display advertisements, there are a variety of them, so the perpetuation of the same message in different forms is continuously played out, without the voter becoming bored or annoyed.

Traditional versus new is a constant battle. New age advertising, however, shows more results due to its specified marketing plan and ability to really focus on individual groups and issues in an inexpensive way.

Guest post provided by Ted Dhanik, provider of display advertising and high performance marketing solutions. Ted Dhanik has his own marketing company called engage:BDR. Ted Dhanik devotes his free time to blogging and mentoring start-ups.