Before you traditional media types email me with your tirades of “How traditional marketing isn’t dead”, and that “You have no idea what you’re talking about”, I should note that most of my background is in traditional marketing and media on the agency side. I’ve spent hours on end writing TV and radio scripts, mulling through Nielsen reports, calculating gross rating points, frequency, and an endless list of data points that attempted to provide the most value possible for my clients. Many of these clients invested quite a bit of their own money for me to provide these services for them, with little guarantee of return on investment. I sold these media with the promise that they would reach the most amount of people and eyeballs for each dollar spent. Looking back (hindsight is always 20/20 right?), my thought process was very flawed.

Sure, you could tag (insert traditional ad medium) with a promo code as a feeble attempt to track return, but at the end of it all with the media market as fragmented as it is, it becomes very difficult to firmly close the loop and determine what actually worked. The key performance indicator (KPI) generally becomes “Did I sell more?” or “Did I see a jump in phone calls?” With how complex market forces are, it’s almost impossible to track a jump in sales to traditional media spend without making some very broad assumptions, and who likes to make business decisions based on assumptions? Exactly.

It should be understood at this point that I’m a huge proponent of digital marketing, more specifically, inbound marketing. The 4 Reasons Traditional Advertising Doesn’t Work Anymore that are below will help explain why.

Read the rest of the post HERE. The author [Brad Larabell] covers four main points:

1. The consumer buying process has changed (A LOT!)

2. Traditional Media Is Interruptive in Nature

3. It Doesn’t Work on Millennial Buyers

4. Lack of Trackability of ROI