Companies are constantly looking for the most effective way to communicate with their target audience. Their intention is to reach the maximum number of potential customers with their messages. They want to get into the consumer's mind and persuade them to take an interest and buy their products and services.
The arrival of the Internet has radically changed the way we do advertising and marketing. Many companies have left conventional advertising behind and have started to introduce in their strategies the so-called Digital Marketing, which introduces a new form of bidirectional communication. Thanks to the Internet, users also participate in the communicative process.
Today, conventional advertising is still present on many platforms, although many seem to have forgotten it. This type of advertising is also called one-way advertising.
To understand this concept, we must first consider what one-way communication is. One-way communication is a communication flow that is transmitted only from sender to receiver. The receiver only receives information, but does not send messages.
There is no feedback from the receiver. Information flows in one direction only. When there is no feedback from the receiver, it is said that we are not talking about communication, but about information. For a communication process to take place, there must be a sender, a message and a receiver.
When we talk about one-way advertising, we see that it has all the characteristics of one-way communication. This is the type of advertising that is introduced in traditional advertising.
Traditional advertising is the one that uses traditional media (press, radio and television) to send a message to a receiver in a unidirectional way.
The company uses traditional channels such as radio, media and television to reach viewers. They do not expect a response from the user, but only transmit a message with the intention of reaching the viewer. It is unidirectional because the advertiser transmits the message and the receiver receives it without participating in the communication process.
With the current boom in Digital Marketing , traditional or one-way advertising has a number of disadvantages:
The advent of the Internet has meant a shift from one-way advertising to two-way advertising, from traditional advertising to digital marketing.
While in one-way advertising there is no feedback, two-way advertising is based on feedback from the sender.
It is a two-way communication because in this case the receiver does participate in the communicative process. Both the sender and the receiver fulfil their role in the communication process. Moreover, if there is no feedback from the receiver, it could be said that the communication is not effective.
Unlike unidirectional advertising, bidirectional advertising is developed through other channels. It no longer uses traditional channels, but takes advantage of new digital platforms such as social networks or websites to advertise its products or services.
This bidirectional advertising is introduced in new Digital Marketing strategies such as branded content or inbound marketing.
In contrast to conventional advertising, bidirectional advertising has a large number of advantages:
One-way advertising is the one we find on television or in the media. It is the one that interrupts our favourite TV programmes or the one that appears just at the best moment of the film. Although it is advertising in which we, as receivers, do not participate, it has evolved and created another type of advertising, two-way advertising. Although the latter is full of possibilities, the former is still part of our daily lives. We hope this post has resolved your doubts!