Local Advertising and The Great Depression

Writing by Brick Marketing on Wednesday, 9 of July , 2008 at 3:16 pm

Tony Dietrich posted an interesting blog about local advertising and infrastructure today called Advertising Pays for a Lot of Things… What Happens When the Ad Budget Dries Up in a Recession?

I loved the promise of the first paragraph of the article and how it set up questions, issues, solutions and possible market targets for me to think about.

Doing some research on the effects of the Great Depression in the 1930s, I started wondering what happened to advertising during that period.
Although I haven’t turned up any detailed studies, I took a look at the various archives of advertising that allow Internet access to their exhibits, and noted the general move to less expensive, more localized advertising, and fewer adverts for more expensive goods.

Now obviously everyone in the marketing business is feeling the results of the American Recession, heck, just about every business sector is feeling the pinch now. I thought it was great that Tony took the time to try and dig up some information about advertising during the Great Depression to try and forecast what kind of trends we are all going to be facing in the near future.

It’s a feature of the 1930s depression that countries and individuals became more and more localized in their habits and mentalities, concentrating on survival rather than expanding their horizons.

The article itself was more about what (might) happen to the infrastructure demand if a depression were to hit full on, but the sideline of local advertising is, to me, the juicy part.

As businesses begin to scale back on their advertising budgets as a whole, focusing on their local market will be wise choice. To do that though, they’re going to need the tools to do the analytics carefully enough to target the RIGHT market, at the RIGHT locations.

                      Category: Local Online Advertising                      

No comments yet.