Evidence that the Babylonians made use of signs on the sides of stores in 3000 B.C. C. shows how long people have been trying to get the word out that they have something that others want. The Acta Diurna was the first Roman newspaper, published in fifty-nine BC. C., so it’s reasonable to assume that a trade-oriented way of life like the Roman Empire or the Republic probably ran ads in newspaper publishers from that time period.

In 1450, Johannes Gutenberg created the movable-type publishing press, which enabled the mass production and circulation of print advertising and the much more efficient production of newspapers. That was the dominant type of advertising and marketing for several hundred years until the advent of radio and television over the last hundred years.

Today we have the online market. Mobile devices. Small personal computers with touch screens.

Due to the rise of the World Wide Web, so many new avenues for advertising and marketing have appeared. Social websites make possible significant mass marketing to people that might have been practically impossible to sustain just ten years ago. SEO boomed along with the ever-popular internet search engine industry, becoming a lucrative venture in its own right. The viral video confirmed the potential possibilities of changing the world of online video streamed over the web, opening up the business of video marketing. Touchscreen phones like the iPhone and Android have even made it easier to put marketing in customers’ pockets. Mobile promotion has become the main way for mobile app designers to finance their initiatives.

So with all these kinds of options…

Which is the best? What will most successfully spread the word?

Why don’t we do an experiment?

You go down the road in your vehicle and enjoy a good song on the radio. And then it stops and an ad plays or the disk jockey starts talking about some product or service that you may not have an affinity for, which is possibly 95% of all the ads you hear on the radio.

What do you do for a living? Change the station probably. Or even reject it. Or even put on a CD.

You are watching television on your sofa shortly after dinner, taking advantage of your favorite program. Then a truly unpleasant and deafening commercial begins. What do you do exactly? Change the channel. Or fast forward because it’s recorded on TiVo or even on the internet via Hulu. In most cases, you may even be viewing a digital copy of the program right from your own PC.

Do you see the reason for the experiment?

Direct mail promotion will be discarded, almost never seen. Magazine ads tend to have questionable success when shown well enough. Yellow pages and phone books? Who exactly wears them the longest? They are shipped everywhere and are usually piled up to collect dust in a corner of the customer’s home. Or scrapped altogether. That’s ad money thrown away for all the logical reasons. Sure, there are some people who still use these, however, the vast majority use the Internet for their search needs for services and goods of all kinds.

In the here and now of the electronic age, the best way to spread the word is the Internet.

Twitter and Facebook. Social networks, the easiest way to spread advertising and marketing on mobile phones and online video promotion to the vast majority of consumers. Google searches have SEO specialists around the world who work around the clock to continuously optimize the use of search engine optimization to make it more beneficial.

Why is this so?

An additional experiment.

You are browsing Facebook and see an ad for a product or service that makes you laugh. You click and see what it is. Someone has just generated revenue from that click, turning the ad into a mechanical return for the organization that posted it, whether they buy anything or not.

Your Twitter catches your attention. You look at it and it’s your favorite celebrity talking about an amazing product or service they just used. You check it out, click on the hyperlinks (which pay people), watch a video clip about another product, and in the end, buy the original product or service your celebrity talked about.

It’s social media (with a celebrity) intertwined with online video marketing as well as paid link marketing.

Write down where you can compare the two that way, you’ll see where online digital promotion demonstrates obvious advantages over any of the older types of marketing.

Case in point: digital distribution service Steam just wrapped up its annual Summer Sale, which received virtually no TV advertising but absolutely massive social media coverage. These Steam sales are so profitable, despite the fact that the game titles are sold at a very low price (which is why they are so effective), that Steam makes two or three of them a year while maintaining the service of most popular video game on the planet and its multi-player gamers. It seems to be much more profitable than putting an ad inside a newspaper that is going to be thrown away.

Do you understand the end result here? Electronic advertising is no longer the technique of the foreseeable future.

It is the technique of now.