For many years we have heard the sirens wailing on and on about the death of a hard-copy yellow pages. As the Gen-Xers age and those who lived through the Great Depression are beginning to rapidly disappear into the great beyond, futurist have been telling us the phonebook will cease to exist. The yellow pages will become irrelevant. Why? The reasons vary. Phonebooks are often outdated the day they are printed. Also, they are not the most userfriendly method of tracking down a person or business. But my favorite point is that we are becoming a population of wired individuals, meaning that more than likely we are already infront of one of multiple devices we own that are readily connected to the web. Why get out of the Laz-y-boy, track down an outdated spider-killer that’s stuffed in a desk drawer, the whole time missing David Lee Roth in his cheek-less spandex on VH1 Classics, just to look for a phone number that may or may not be there when your iPhone is right in your pocket?

But today during my lunch break I was enjoying the finest delicacy my wife could whip up using a microwave and a chicken pot pie and watching ‘Drake & Josh’ with the kids and I noticed something about the commercials. Ever since DoubleClick was a mere glimmer in the eye of the internet, the knock on T.V. advertising has been that it doesn’t provide the statistics that online advertising can obtain. For years, 1-800 numbers have been linked to individual ad campaigns, a company’s ad on a a particular station, or even a company’s ad during a particular time slot. So trying to track leads through television advertising is nothing new. The new incarnation of this is all the scam artist out there running ads about working from home or debt consolidation. You’ll see the same generic ad on every station. In that ad, the web address is never spoken by one of the actors. The only place you’ll see an address is at the bottom of the screen and usually the url will be something like www.workfromhome2543.com. The 2543 isn’t relevant to to anyone except the advertiser. The url usually redirects to some other domain altogether, but 2543 allows them run that url on MSNBC, www.workfromhome777.com on FoxNews and www.workfromhome666.com on CNN. Now they know what news network is driving the most traffic. For more legit companies, Intuit for example, I’ve even recently seen www.quicken.com/TV or some variation. All this used to be done simply to track who produces and who doesn’t.

But today during that somewhat enjoyable episode of ”Drake & Josh’, I noticed television advertising has almost passed me by. Actually, they have given in to my subliminal thinking. Effective T.V. advertising no longer feels the need to bombard us with as much information as they can squeeze into a 30-second spot. Why? We’ve become so savy, they realize that we will find the information we are looking for. If an advertisement catches my attention, I don’t call a sales rep and play 20-questions. I simply pull up Firefox and I’m presented with the greatest advertising machine ever built, a search engine. I simply search for what I want to know. The roll of commercials is becoming to simply create awareness that such a business exist. Case-in-point, New Wave Communications. They’ve recently become the local cable service provider. Even before they officially took over, they began running ads simply telling the viewer ‘We’re here and our name is New Wave’. The rest was left up to me. It was up to me to search for their site, find out their packages and rates and basically inform myself. It looks like T.V. advertisements have evolved. It looks like advertising on television will be around a little while longer, which is great because I can’t wait for Terry Tate to come out of retirement. I’ve got to call a plumber, now where did I put that phonebook?

This entry was posted on Friday, July 13th, 2007 at 7:02 am and is filed under Randomness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.