Traditional Advertising vs Digital Advertising: A Comparison

Ever since the creation of social media and multiple online tools, digital advertising has exponentially increased and surpassed traditional advertising. However, the COVID-19 pandemic might have started to turn the tide for traditional advertising as businesses found an increase in traditional advertising expenses in 2020. What makes the popularity of digital advertising skyrocket, and why is traditional advertising interminable?

What is Traditional Advertising?

What Is Traditional Advertising

Traditional advertising is all types of advertising methods before digital advertising emerged, usually with a main objective of reaching a mass audience regardless of what demographic they belong to. Traditional advertisement has been in place since the dawn of time and still holds a place in Hong Kong. The distribution of traditional advertising is: 

  • Television (9.7%)
  • Press (8.4%)
  • OOH (8%)
  • Event marketing (8%) 

Advantages of Traditional Advertising

Traditional Advertising Advantages

  1. Penetrable into people’s lives. People will encounter OOH inevitably if they leave their homes. Even if they do not, there are still newspapers and magazines people rely on to obtain news, not to forget television advertising which exists in almost all households in Hong Kong.

  2. Higher exposure rate. As just established, traditional advertisements can find their way into the daily lives of their audiences. Due to the large amount of advertising space around Hong Kong, the exposure for traditional advertising is higher and can increase your brand awareness.

Disadvantage of Traditional Advertising

  1. Higher advertising cost. In traditional advertising, you usually buy quite a lot of advertising space for each ad campaign since the main goal is to reach as many people as possible. The cost is much higher considering traditional advertising spaces are usually more expensive.

What is Digital Advertising?

As the emerge of the digital age, most people will have seen at least a digital ad or two. Digital advertisements are categorized by their use of online platforms or other technological tools to promote your brand or service. According to the Advertising Bureau of Hong Kong (IAB HK), a total of $531 million USD has been spent on digital advertising in Hong Kong alone.

Digital advertising - Internet Ads

Advantages of Digital Advertising

  1. Audience can directly interact with your digital advertisements. Being able to view ads on digital media means being able to click on the ad if they are interested. The users would be brought to a landing page to either learn about the brand or product and make a purchase. 

  2. It is easier to track and monitor the performance of your ad. There are numerous online tools, some even built-in for social media platforms to aid advertisers with monitoring their performance. They show different stats to indicate campaign performance so that advertisers can make changes and optimize their ads for maximum results.

Disadvantage of Digital Advertising

  1. There are many different ways to purchase digital advertising space, therefore you must pay attention and do research, so you can ensure your budget and other details are appropriate for the campaign and business needs. Some platforms undergo real-time bidding for their advertising spaces. In such a case, you need to do extra research and estimate how much your competitors are willing to pay.

Differences Between Digital Advertising and Traditional Advertising

difference between online advertising and traditional advertising

Digital advertisements are interactive and could relay more information upon the user’s request since they are interconnected to the internet and can easily transfer users to a landing page. Whereas traditional advertisements cannot be interacted with as the audiences are only on the receiving end of the ads. If viewers would like more information about your product or brand, they would have to obtain more information themselves and some would find it too tedious.

Furthermore, digital advertising is dependent on people’s mobile devices or computers. Advertising would not reach people without an internet connection or electronic devices when traditional advertising is boundless to certain devices or technology.  There are different types of traditional advertising, each utilising a different medium to advertise to their audience.

Traditional advertising does not target very specific groups of audiences, instead aims at advertising to as many people as possible so the ads may not always be shown to interested parties. Yet, digital advertising places emphasis on precise audience targeting, making this method of advertising often more effective.

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