Monday, September 28, 2009

Advertising and beaches, what's wrong with the media?

A thought while reading my Sunday Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. There's an old advertising slogan that says without advertising consumers don't know what they're missing. I was thinking of that as I planned a winter vacation while looking at the very thin four-page Travel section with only a couple of ads, and none of them offering anything new. Whereas once upon a time, I had a fat section with lots of advertising suggesting different locations, now the locations all are spending all their money online. So how do I find them? I can't call my travel agent, because the personal service ones have been replaced by human robots reading prices off computers and without any real knowledge. I can't call hotels and packagers that I don't know about. I just stuck "beach vacations Mexico" on a Google search, and got 252,000 hits -- worthless for giving me good ideas.
So why is it that I am the one saying this? Why aren't newspapers and magazines uniting to sell their value in advertising of their own? The cheap online ad folks are constantly pushing their products, even without real evidence that they work.
And I'll probably go back to the same beach I've visited for most of the past decade because nobody really wants to sell me on a new location.

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