While you are speeding along the highway at ninety kilometers an hour, a billboard advertising a store, an online platform, a brand or anything else is large enough that you have time to read its text and see its image. Or perhaps for some time now, whichever site you open, you see the same ad in the corner. You forget that ad a second later; but its image settles in a corner of your mind. Various companies and brands are competing to take a larger place in minds through advertising. In this competition they can work through two methods, traditional advertising and digital advertising. Which of these two paths do you think is more profitable?
What is digital advertising
Digital advertising refers to internet methods and online advertising. Types of digital advertising more precisely include advertising on social networks, websites, advertising accompanied by content production, awareness (introductory) advertising, inbound (attraction) advertising, email advertising, PPC advertising (pay per click) and advertising through search engines. Digital advertising also uses an individual's repeated daily use of the internet to reach them.
Advantages of digital advertising
Although the impact of traditional advertising may be considerable, it cannot be forgotten that we live in the internet age. According to statistics presented in 2023, internet users in the world number 5 billion and 180 million people, or in other words 64.6 percent of the world's population [2]. On average people spend 6 hours and 42 minutes of their time on the internet each day. In 2022 e-commerce revenue passed 5.7 trillion dollars and more than 70 percent of electronic purchases were made through smartphones [3].
Digital marketing has more options for interacting with the audience. Through channels such as advertising on social networks, it is possible for the advertising individual or company to see what the audience thinks about their brand and advertising methods. If an ad is shared enough, liked and has many positive responses, one can tell that it has been a successful ad.
Measuring digital marketing advertising campaigns is easy. Unlike traditional advertising, the features of digital advertising for tracking how far advertising-campaign principles have an effect are unique. This helps the lessons learned for subsequent advertising methods increase considerably.
It is possible to target specific audiences intelligently in digital marketing. For example, if there is an advertising tool that identifies people of a given age, gender and interests, a complete piece of advertising content can be produced for them.
Disadvantages of digital advertising
Some digital marketing methods may be considered annoying. Sometimes ads for a particular age group may appear at the wrong time or against the audience's wishes. This may actively cause the person to lose interest in the advertised brand.
The staying power of types of digital and modern advertising is lower. The effect of types of digital marketing such as Google ads, attractive digital banners, email ads or types of ads on social networks can be short-term and fleeting. These digital-marketing ads have a virtual form and can simply be ignored by the audience. For example, if the audience scrolls the online page, the advertising content will leave their monitor or smartphone screen [1[.
Digital sales methods are constantly evolving. The advertising individual or company must learn many things in order to reach more of their digital advertising goals. Each advertising method in digital marketing usually has its own specialist. For advertising in digital marketing one usually has to contact a professional digital-marketing person or agency so that the best result is obtained.
What is traditional advertising
Traditional advertising includes outdoor advertising such as billboard and sign advertising, the bodies of public vehicles, posters, or media advertising such as mass media including radio and television ads, or print advertising such as magazines and newspapers, or postal advertising such as catalogs, or remote marketing such as SMS and phone calls.
Until the 1990s and the development of the internet, types of traditional advertising were almost the only way to market. Of course traditional advertising still plays an important role in today's world. An effective traditional ad, for example on a highway, can still matter as much as 20 years ago because of its long-term effects on memory. In this type of advertising, the person unconsciously considers themselves part of the brand being advertised and connects with it.
Advantages of traditional advertising
Traditional advertising methods are effective and easy to understand. Seeing a large advertising billboard or an attractive television ad is part of people's ordinary daily life. These types of ads are understandable and often entertaining. The impact of billboard ads installed on highways at large volume and size on the audience's mind is great. Or poster ads installed on the bodies of vehicles can stay continuously and regularly in front of the audience's eyes for several months and stamp their unconscious effect on their mind.
Print marketing items and methods are more permanent. The characteristic of print and written media is durability. If the ad is in a magazine, the ad will also exist until the magazine is recycled. In this way print ads can remain in the audience's library for years.
Types of traditional advertising stay more in the audience's memory. Seeing an image or text in real life instead of seeing it on a phone probably remains more in memory. An ad on the sports shirts of popular football teams, or a beautiful and attractive shop window, is likely to stay in the mind more than ads on Instagram that the audience will probably scroll past quickly.
Disadvantages of traditional advertising
Examining advertising evaluation indicators and the level of audience attraction in traditional advertising methods is hard. Although there are ways to measure how far the goals of a traditional advertising campaign have been achieved, such as the amount of increase in sales. But these measurements are never similar to digital advertising tools in terms of accuracy and intelligence.
The price of traditional advertising management tools is often expensive. If a brand is at the beginning of its work, it probably does not have the money needed for several pages of advertising in a well-known magazine. Many traditional advertising methods have a high cost.
In traditional sales methods there is no direct connection with the consumer. Unlike digital marketing on social networks, in traditional marketing the audience's reactions and comments are more or less impossible to obtain.
A statistical comparison of traditional and digital advertising in the world
As the figures say, digital advertising is growing and in some cases overtaking traditional advertising. Modern digital advertising in the world reached the threshold of 389.29 billion dollars in 2021. While types of traditional advertising were 275.8 billion dollars. It has also been estimated that spending on and the price of digital advertising in the United States will reach 200 billion dollars in 2023. These statistics indicate the power of modern digital advertising.
72 percent of sellers believed that advertising on social networks had been more effective than traditional advertising. In 2022, spending on advertising via mobile phones in the United States was higher than advertising on television. This method accounted for 43 percent of advertising spending across all media.
A person in the world on average spends twice as much of their time online as ten years ago, which has led to an increase in the impact of digital advertising. In 2019 advertisers in the United States spent 54.2 percent of their advertising budget on digital advertising. This was while they allocated only 31.7 percent of their advertising budget to types of traditional advertising.
Business owners' emphasis on digital advertising
58 percent of brand owners in the world have said digital advertising has been more effective than traditional advertising. Another statistic shows that 64 percent of consumers are more likely to make a purchase after seeing an advertising video, something that is almost impossible through traditional advertising methods. Even so, there is also a possibility of fraud in digital advertising. For example, one estimate shows that in 2022, 44 billion dollars of fraud occurred worldwide through not delivering ads to real people.
Another statistic shows that 91 percent of businesses increased their digital advertising budget in 2021, a figure 13 percent higher than in 2020. Also, 66 percent of business owners in 2021 preferred digital advertising to the advantages of traditional advertising. They believed digital advertising brought them closer to their target population.
Another statistic shows that advertising on Google on average generates 2 dollars of revenue for every 1 dollar of advertising spending. It is estimated that in 2023 advertising through direct mail will have fallen 3.3 percent and will reach the figure of 42.80 billion dollars, which indicates increased emphasis on internet advertising.
In 2019 the CPM (revenue per thousand views) of billboard advertising was 5.22 dollars, while this amount for types of digital advertising was 2.80 dollars. This shows that in modern digital advertising the cost per thousand views is lower.
Another report shows that 95 percent of business owners have found that reaching their advertising audiences again through a digital advertising strategy has been more effective than traditional advertising. Finally, another report shows that companies that have online advertising have 40 percent more customer retention than companies that use only traditional advertising methods.[4,5]
A statistical comparison of traditional and digital advertising in Iran
The mobile-phone penetration rate in Iran rose from 39.5 percent in 2008 to 110.53 percent in 2018 (Table 1). Also, internet bandwidth in Iran rose from 6.05 gigabits/second in 2008 to 1500 gigabits/second in 2018 (Table 2). As a result, with the increase in internet bandwidth and the use of smartphones, the grounds for making and distributing types of digital advertising in Iran were also provided.
Spending on digital advertising in Iran rose from 150 billion tomans in 2016 to 796 billion tomans in 2020 (Table 3), which indicates a striking increase in online advertising in Iran over these four years.
Also, spending on traditional advertising in Iran rose from 4500 billion tomans in 2016 to 5000 billion tomans in 2020 (Table 4), which indicates relative stability in types of traditional advertising.[6]
Total advertising spending in Iran in 2020 was estimated at 826 million dollars. A substantial share of the advertising budget was allocated to traditional advertising, which shows that unlike the global average, traditional advertising still accounts for a larger share in Iran[7] (Table 5).
Conclusion
Until the appearance of the internet in the world in 1990, traditional advertising accounted for the entire share of advertising. Until the global spread of the internet and the entry of smartphones into the market, traditional advertising still held a large share of advertising. But in the past decade, with the astonishing spread of the internet and smartphones in the world, digital advertising has increasingly taken a larger share of advertising. Choosing between digital and traditional sales, and considering the advantages and disadvantages of traditional and modern marketing, are probably questions that face business owners.
It seems that for the final choice, the type of audience, the amount of the advertising budget and the geographic region are important factors that must be taken into account in methods of advertising products and services. In the end, despite the daily expansion of digital marketing, it does not seem that this type of advertising can completely replace types of traditional advertising.
Sources
1-https://99designs.com/blog/marketing-advertising/digital-marketing-vs-traditional-marketing/
2- https://www.statista.com/statistics/617136/digital-population-worldwide/
3-https://www.statista.com/statistics/568684/e-commerce-website-visit-and-orders-by-device/
4-https://blog.gitnux.com/online-advertising-vs-traditional-advertising-statistics/
5- https://zipdo.co/statistics/online-advertising-vs-traditional-advertising/
6- https://techrasa.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Iran-AdTech-Overview-2018.pdf
7- https://techrasa.com/2021/02/21/iran-adtech-report-2020/
Machine-translated from Persian by Namafar; the Persian original is authoritative. Read the original in Persian