I dropped by my travel agent yesterday to purchase tickets for upcoming business/personal trips in December. He is a local business owner who operates a fairly successful office in Halifax that would be identified as a ‘small business’. We casually chatted about our various states of affairs, and I mentioned the launch of my airport advertising venture as I wondered if the target market would be of interest to travel agencies.

He declined the offer to advertise, siting low budgets and unfamiliarity with the return from advertising on Kick Media’s newly installed LCD screens inside airport limousines and taxis. When I asked him where does he currently advertise, he mentioned that he runs a regular spot on the Sunday Herald in Halifax. I further asked if the spot has been producing the results he expected. He said ‘Oh yes, it’s been good!’. Then, after a moment of silence, he said ‘actually, it hasn’t been turning up much business lately, now that I think about it’. It costs $150 for a month’s worth of advertising with Kick Media. Running a recurrent spots in in a local newspaper can cost upwards of $1000 per month. I guess we are creatures of habit after all.

The competition between new and old media for advertising dollars is beginning to heat up in Halifax. As consumers become desensitized to the barrage of advertising they encounter in traditional media like TV and newspapers, advertisers are noticing lower returns on their advertising investments. Over time, consumers learned how to block off the ads. They change channels during commercials, or gloss over the ad boxes in the paper as they zoom in on the news content. This hurts the small business owner who can’t afford to purchase the full-page spread or the cost of producing an exceptionally attractive TV ad.

Ken Rutkowski, The L.A. host of daily Internet and radio talk show “World Tech Round-Up” (which draws a whopping 186,000 listeners in 40 countries), believes new media will emerge as the winner because the customer is essentially the advertiser. (NSBusinessJournal)

Ask a member of the so-called old media, such as a newspaper, what their product is and they’ll inevitably answer “content,” he said. Ask a new media company and they will say it’s the audience. “Advertisers – they could care less about content,” Rutkowski told the crowd. They want the viewer, the web surfer, the listener, the reader.