Being alive in the 21st century is an amazing feeling. Of course, there’s always the negative side of things if you want to see them. The opportunities available to people to expand themselves is growing each and every day.

The opportunities which exist for a business owner, whether new or long term industry leader, are nearly immeasurable. The ability to have your product or service, available to be purchased 24 hours a day, 7 days a week is unprecedented, and still relatively unfamiliar territory.

Wide spread use of the web is still rather new (at only around 15 years), and yet it reaches a wider audience, 10 times faster than each other advertising medium. The web is crowded, loud, chock full of dead ends, loopholes, and obstacles. But it is also instant, powerful, and it can be your most powerful advertising tool if you wish it to be; you just need to find the experts to lead you.

Winnipeg is a great town, Canada is a great country. Both still “young” if such a term could ever be used in such ways. But the business advertising model is greatly outdated in Winnipeg, with a lot of stock still being put into traditional means of advertising with newspapers, radio and tv ads. In 2008 in Canada, 70% of households had a broadband internet connection, always on high speed access to the web. Instead of going on more and more, I’ll use the graphic below to illustrate my point:

When a person turns on their browser, they’ve the ability to search 1 billion plus web pages for anything and everything. Being found in all of that is like a needle in a haystack right? What if I told you, you don’t need to play that game. That you could be the farmer to that haystack, move it all out of the way so you have a clear path to work?

Strange metaphores aside, to put it extremely plainly, old media advertising is slowly dieing. The generation of today, doesn’t subscribe to the newspaper, they read it online. They don’t listen to the radio for the latest news, they check Twitter, or Facebook to see what their friends and family are doing and what they’ve noticed. People don’t go looking for the news, the news finds them now. As a business, it’s time to adjust or be lost in the pack. Online advertising, and working in a mobile business model is going to be key to market success going forward.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, so I’ll let this last one speak for me. The team at Fresh Traffic, can help you bring your company to where it should be online. Let us put you back out front of the rat race, and propel your business to the success it deserves.

The chairman of the National Film Board says Canada risks being left in the dust by other countries on the information highway if it doesn’t put serious thought into dealing with the digital age.

Hurray for Mr Tom Perlmutter, Please call me, we have something in common.

He says “It affects all sectors, it affects government, it affects education, it affects health sectors, it affects politics. You only have to look at the presidency of Obama. I cannot imagine that he would have been elected president without the power of the Internet.”

Obama used the Internet to reach out to supporters and raise millions in funds for his campaign, that’s true and we know better than most.

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If you require expert advice or help on the digital age Call us 204.942.4200

Struggling internet company AOL is pleading for patience from investors, insisting that online advertising revenues will pick up in the next two years.

Time Warner laboured over the decision to untangle themselves from the lead weight of AOL, but finally decided to jettison the company in February. Nine years ago, the two companies made the “deal of the century” with a merger that saw AOL takeover Time Warner for $160 billion.

It didn’t take long for the deal to go sour. The “transformed landscape” of digital media quickly turned into a quagmire, with AOL failing to move with the changing trends, crucially missing out on the broadband explosion and early movers who made the most out of the emerging internet advertising movement.

As subscribers dropped by two thirds, AOL shrivelled into virtual insignificance. The company changed its business model to focus on digital marketing but by then they had lost the edge of being on the frontier, and were playing catch up with the likes of Google and Yahoo. In the last three quarters, AOL’s revenue took a 20 per cent nose dive, hastening Time Warner’s decision to ditch its partner.

AOL’s chief executive Tim Armstrong told investors that AOL will make a comeback in the advertising market as the industry bounces back from the recession. “Advertisers are going to be driving to Internet Road and AOL is a major property on Internet Road,” Mr Armstrong told Reuters. The new look AOL will be pure display advertising, but with the frontier moving again to SEO, AOL could once again be caught one step behind its competitors.

From Company Push to Consumer Pull
What is push and pull marketing? Push is the 30-second TV / radio spot. Push is the billboard and web banner. Push is the full-page magazine / newspaper spread. Push is becoming evermore difficult to push. The converse of push, is pull. Pull marketing is engaging; interactive; a two-way line of communication. To illustrate the push / pull marketing dynamic 15 years ago, if you were in the market to buy a TV, what resources would you have at your disposal? TV, radio, billboard, direct mail advertisements might have influenced your decision. Those messages are finely crafted to be persuasive. In essence: they’re bias. For a more objective view, you might turn to your friend that knows something about TVs. Or, you can go to Best Buy and they might be able to educate and inform your decision. In short, advertisements and a handful of “experts” were your resources. That was the push / pull dynamic then.

In the digital era, we can better manage and prioritize the influence of each resource. With the ubiquity of the internet, resources are seemingly endless; therefore you can choose which are more important as you refine our decision. Where in the past your decision was constrained to a limited number of resources, in the digital age, there are countless information hubs to help you choose one product over another. With the extensive consumer conversation on social media sites and product pages, what weight does the mass message—pushed from TV, billboard, radio, etc—carry when you’re making your decision? Though consumers will still soak up push marketing—and factor those impressions into their spending decisions—the internet and its vast networking reach typically bypasses traditional push media. In the past, the number of resources was limited—therefore each opinion meant more and consumers were just consumers. In today’s age, consumers are researchers, advocates, creators, promoters and marketers.

Reallocation of Marketing Efforts
In response to this consumer empowerment, companies are developing new strategies to adapt and grow in this different marketing world. Consider the marketing landscape only 15 years ago. If a company wanted to launch a product, they would allocate X amount of dollars to cast a wide net of impressions to influence a buying decision.

In a world influenced by the digital consumer network, even the word “consumer” is limiting in its simplicity. In the most innovative marketing efforts, consumers are the creators, advocates, promoters, marketers and buyers. To have a presence in the new consumer world, marketers are facilitating the conversation and activities through valuable tools and concepts online. The most engaging marketing tools can be implemented in the digital world. With a multi-sensorial experience and a multitude of engagement opportunities, brands can enhance their consumer experience beyond the conventional marketing tactics.

Pull marketing combines viral, blogging, social media, SEO, internet marketing, RSS etc. into a methodology where consumers engage and build something with the brand. No longer is advertising an interruption between news, or a distraction in nature’s landscape. Marketing is more about choice and engagement, less than it is a distraction. If you are relying too much on heavily push media today, now is the time to embrace the paradigm shift towards consumer-powered marketing