Some sixty years ago, David Ogilvy wrote:

"The consumer isn't a moron; she is your wife."

She is your business partner and your success, and Mr. Oglivy was right then, as he is now. After all, a customer generates revenue, and every company wants to deliver the appropriate message to the appropriate audience at the appropriate moment. Despite changes in approaches, the goal of reaching as many potential customers as possible at the lowest cost has not changed.

Confused? Rather, ask yourself, "What is the best way for us to grow our customer base without wasting money?"

The advertising industry is massive, and as with any large industry, it attracts smart marketers who make money by showing your ads, and they are constantly looking for new ways to increase their income by showing your ads as many times as possible. Choosing an advertising strategy that suits your needs is not always easy.

We aim to make it easier.

Using these side-by-side comparisons, you’ll find the best features for your needs and understand the pros and cons of each form of advertising. It’ll help you identify the advertising method that works best and can easily scale as you grow.

Do you want to make a specific comparison? Are you wondering if there is a better alternative to ADI? There simply aren't any...  You'll see why when you compare the most common types of advertising.

Online
Online advertising includes paid ads on search engine results, banner ads on online magazines, blogs, viral videos, and social media sites. 

The Internet is fast becoming a medium of choice for small businesses because ads can be targeted to specific population demographics and locations and are conducive to any budget.
 Compared to traditional advertising options, online advertising is relatively inexpensive, trackable, and measurable. The costs associated with online advertising include graphic design, copywriting costs, and the cost per 1000 views (CPM), also called CPC (Pay Per Click) fees, where you bid a certain amount to present your link and text message to users of search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo! 

Medium	Advantages	Limitations
Banner, pop-up, and text ads CPM (cost per 1000 views)	High selectivity, low cost, immediacy, and no interactive capabilities.	The impact is relatively low, and the audience has control over the exposure.
Paid search placements: CPC (Pay Per Click)	High selectivity, low to medium cost, immediacy, and interactive capabilities.	The impact is moderate, and the exposure is under the control of the audience.
Social media	Social media platforms send ads to users who are most likely to be interested in their products and services.	The impact is moderate, and the audience has control over the exposure.
Direct mail, email, and telemarketing	High audience selectivity, flexibility, no ad competition within the same medium, and personalization.	Relatively high cost per exposure; “junk mail” image

Broadcast media

Almost half of all media advertising expenditures are made on broadcast media, which includes television and radio, with TV advertising accounting for about 65% of all such expenditures. 

Given that TV ads can be targeted both locally and nationally, it is a significant and economical advertising medium for businesses seeking out new customers. TV ads grab a consumer's attention whether they’re in the room or not, making the ads more accessible than radio advertising.

But are smaller businesses in local markets wise to invest in broadcast media? The cost of creating a television or radio advertisement includes both production and air time, and it also depends on the level of design, talent fees, and the time of day it airs.

Medium	Advantages	Limitations
Television	Television offers good mass market coverage, has a low cost per exposure, combines sight, sound, and motion, and appeals to the senses.	Fleeting messages, meaning they disappear once the commercial spot ends; High absolute costs, high clutter, fleeting exposure, and less audience selectivity.
Radio	Good local acceptance; high geographic and demographic selectivity; low cost; allows for repetition and frequency.	Fleeting messages, meaning they disappear once the commercial spot ends; The medium solely consists of audio, provides short-lived exposure, garners minimal attention, is referred to as "the half-heard" medium, and caters to fragmented audiences.

Print media

Magazines, newspapers, phone books, billboards, and direct mail are all examples of print media. This important advertising medium reaches a large and wide audience. Trade publications, particularly those tailored to a specific industry or profession, provide an effective platform for businesses to invest in targeted advertising. Print media's associated costs are the creation and production costs of advertisements, as well as the size, placement, and time of year. 

Medium	Advantages	Limitations
Newspapers	Flexibility; timeliness; good local market coverage; broad acceptability, and high believability	The lifespan of newspapers is brief, their reproduction quality is subpar, and their pass-along audience is limited.
Magazines	Magazines offer a highly selective audience that is generally interested in ads closely related to the magazine's topic.  High demographic selectivity; credibility and prestige; high-quality reproduction; long life and good pass-along readership	Long ad purchase lead time; high cost; no guarantee of position

Infomercials and Product Placement

Product placement is a more recent form of advertising in which you pay for a TV show, movie, video game, or theme park to promote your goods or services to viewers. Typically, product demonstrations are 30-minute or 30-second product placements. Infomercials, which are broadcast on conventional television and cable, entice consumers through product education and savvy presentation methods.

Medium	Advantages	Limitations
Product demonstrations	Effective means of introducing a new product to the market include, typically, 30-minute product demonstrations	The high costs associated with producing an infomercial include production, talent, location, and airtime.
Product placements	Product placements serve as an efficient method for launching a new product into the market.	30-seconds

Out Of Home

Out-of-home (OOH) advertising reaches consumers when they are not at home and is useful for spreading information about a company, a product, or a campaign to as many people as possible. Each “OOH opportunity” is given an “OOH rating," which ultimately determines its value and the subsequent cost to advertisers. OOH opportunities are typically placed in high-traffic areas, such as along highways and in cities, so that they’re seen by the highest number of drivers and pedestrians and have the highest number of views and impressions when compared to other marketing strategies because they are in such busy areas. 

Medium	Advantages	Limitations
Billboard types are Classic (static or print) Digital (dynamic moving images) Mobile (taxis, trucks, and busses) Street furniture POS Bus shelters Kiosks.	Bus shelters and kiosks offer flexibility, high repeat exposure, low cost, minimal message competition, excellent positional selectivity, strong visual references, and beneficial branding.	Little audience selectivity, creative limitations It is not possible to target specific markets because of their very short exposure time, which only provides limited information.

The average cost for advertising in US$ are

Type	Total Viewership	Total Cost
Newspapers	National: 2,000,000	$300 per square inch per day (average of 4 square inches) per week: $6000
Television	National: 10,000,000	$100,000 per day—$700,000 per week
Direct Mail	This is entirely dependent on the size of the country's population.	$2 per letter, one time only
Radio	National: 500,000	$150 per week
Magazine	500,000 readers	$10,000 per month for a single advertisement.
Outdoor (OOH) advertising	In a major city, 1,000,000	~ $25,000 per week
Online	on a search engine, 20,000,000	~ $20,000 per month

 

Don't think advertising is going to work for you? Even a massive corporation like Google invested 18% of its first quarter 2022 earnings in marketing to attract users and customers. Spending on advertising will increase from more than 628 billion dollars in 2018 to more than 790 billion dollars in 2022, predicts Statista.  With that much money at stake, the advertising industry established "standards."

The two main standards in online advertising

1. cost per 1,000 impressions" (CPM, "M" is a thousand from the French Mille); and
2. cost per click (CPC, also known as pay per click (PPC)).

Cost per 1,000 impressions (CPM)

This standard allows advertisers to "compare" the costs of using various advertising mediums. True, this developed "standard" provides the advertising industry guidance and offers a "measurement" to inform you of how frequently people are seeing your advertisement. Ask yourself this: "How many of the 1,000 viewers that see my advertisement are looking for what I offer?"

The question is not clear enough? Let us put it another way: What do you do when you see (yet another) advertisement? Please consider honestly whether you think, "Oh great, just what I was looking for, great timing." Do you find yourself clicking away, as many others often do?

The CPM model may seem like a low-cost way of showing your advertisement 1,000 times for as little as $2–$4. However, was the individual interested in what I offer and located within the area I wish to target? Conventional "cheap" comes with not knowing!

As an advertiser, you pay to create the advertisement and display it on the platform without receiving any tangible benefit. It is not unlike buying a lottery ticket in the hope of winning the big prize.

Sure, a thousand people have seen your advertisement, and according to the "industry standard" CPM model, you pay. But CPM doesn't say anything about the "quality" of those viewers. What element is absent? "Who"—as in who is viewing your ads, not just how many ads were served. Does my online advertising reach my target audience? 

A (dated) Nielsen Research analysis found that only 25% of its ads were reaching the right households. Think about the expensive process of making and displaying an advertisement. What is the purpose of your advertising? Who pays for it, and who made money from it? 

Isn't advertising just to get you in front of people who want what you have? 

When I read that large advertisers, such as Procter & Gamble (which cut $200M), JPMorgan Chase (which slashed ad reach by 99%), Uber (which cut $200M), and eBay (which cut $100M), made significant reductions in their digital ad budgets and observed little or no measurable impact on their businesses, I wonder if CPM is truly the way forward. Just think about it!

Cost Per Click (CPC) to the rescue

CPC, also called Pay-per-click (PPC), is a good step toward successful advertising. It is all about drawing the right customers to the right place at the right time.  Every time someone clicks on your ad, you pay a publisher.

There are the "conventional" publishers who charge you as much as the market will bear, and there is ADI, with as slogan "Offer a lot, Charge a little."

One of the most common types of CPC advertising is Google Ads, which enables you to pay for top slots on Google's search engine results pages at a price "per click." Other major channels that use CPC are:

1 - Paid ads on Facebook: Pay to customize a video, image post, or slideshow, which Facebook will publish to the news feeds of people who match your business's audience.

2 - X (formerly Twitter) Ads campaigns: Pay to place a series of posts or profile badges on the news feeds of a specific audience, all dedicated to accomplishing a specific goal for your business. This goal can be website traffic, more Twitter followers, tweet engagement, or even app downloads.

3 - Sponsored Messages on LinkedIn: Pay to send messages directly to specific LinkedIn users based on their industry and background.

Under this standard, you incur charges each time a user clicks on your CPC ad. If you set a high price for a keyword, your ad will be shown.

In exchange for paying a high price, you receive information about who viewed your ad and when. Let us, for example, look at the graph for the 20 most expensive CPC keywords in Google Ads. 

Remember this: for online platforms, the CPC model is all about charging as much as possible for each keyword by having advertisers bid on it.

For the advertiser, the CPC model is all about “having to outbid my colleagues to get our advertisement shown when a search has been entered that matches with our keyword."