Canadian Marketing Blog

Obsolete Marketing

I’m obsessed with anything CBC Radio; well specifically I’m obsessed with Metro Morning with Andy Barrie and Q: The Podcast with Jian Ghomeshi.

On September 17th, Jian had Anna Jane Grossman on the program. Anna has written, Obsolete: An Encyclopedia of Once-Common Things Passing Us By. It is a book about some of the things and practices that have become obsolete lately. Simple things like manual car windows, dial-up modems, and plaster casts (the ones that let you live in infamy on the broken arm of a friend), and funny things like body hair, phone sex (now it’s all about sex-texting), and afternoon specials (the TV after school specials that is...).

The interview between Anna and Jian got me thinking. What are some of the things and practices that have become obsolete in marketing?

One that comes to my mind is the pop-up ad. Pop-ads are useless and annoying little things; they appear as if from nowhere when you least expect it. They were initially conceived as a clever way to attract web surfers to a specific web address, or a sneaky way to capture email addresses. It would seem to me that the only thing pop-up ads do are to slow down the page being loaded and annoy users using a page they want to be on. They are so annoying that Internet users have the option to block pop-up ads.

Can you think of any other marketing tools/practices that are now obsolete?

How about business lingo on the homepage about "leveraging strategic synergies" (etc)?

If we can't tell what your company does by looking at your homepage, then it's failed. :)

What about telemarketing? Does anyone want or trust the offered services on the other end? We now even have a telemarketing block list in Canada for adding residential numbers in an attempt to stop the calls.

Honestly, while first thing that came to my mind was tv advertising.

I don't remember the last time I watched live TV: now I fast forward through all advertisments EXCEPT the very odd one. If something catches my eye at fast forward speeds, if it's something I havn't seen before, something where I am not sure who the brand is MAYBE I might let it play at normal speet. But only once per ad for sure. And I am in marketing and am interested in these things. My wife certainly never stops the fast forward.

So TV advertising is obsolete to me. But clearly it isn't to marketers, because I still do a lot of fast forwarding.

What about scent strips in magazines? While I no longer read 17 magazine, I don't recall smelling one of those in a while. Do they still exist?

If you expect that you can simply put up your site on the internet and people will swarm to it and you never have to do anything again, think again. That simply doesn’t happen. That’s what they don’t show you – what happens after the end of the movie. The hero gets rich but has to work hard to stay rich. It’s the same with your site. You will need to constantly change with the business, the technology and the internet’s thought process to remain in business. You need continuous updating, in terms of marketing, optimization of your technology and content, and even your offerings.