Free business cards with free shipping may seem a little too good to be true, but it is a useful tool for many online printers and designers.
By adding a discrete advert to the back of the card, printers can offer these cards free of charge to customers. The cards aren’t free to the printer, but they are supported by the advertisers who want to reach a target audience. They generally don’t want to be associated with lower quality cards either so free doesn’t mean cheap looking. Many advertisers will pay extra to appear of 14pt card with good quality finishes rather than cheap cards.
With the gradual decline of traditional advertising methods, companies are having to be more and more creative when vying for the attention of potential customers. The public in general are becoming immune to television commercials, magazine adverts and billboards. We are so used to being constantly bombarded with marketing that we become desensitized to it and it loses value. The marketers know this and are always looking for new ways to appeal to target markets and sell their clients products.
As a consequence, TV stations and magazine revenues are down significantly as advertisers move towards other media. Online such as Google Adwords, YouTube and other viral marketing outlets, banner advertising, spam mails and numerous other ways of advertising are becoming increasingly used in order to sell you things you don’t need.
Necessity drives innovation, which is why we are seeing a shift in the way advertisers ply their trade. As the audiences tastes and habits change, the marketers strategies must change. PVRs and streaming TV negates a lot of television advertising so they moved to program sponsorships, item placement, viral advertising and celebrity endorsements.
This is an uphill struggle though as many web users are jaded when it comes to advertising and will do whatever it takes to avoid it. From Adware to popups, Trojans serving ads to page after page of useless information used as a crutch for advertising.
The latest marketing “innovation” is to offer stuff free to people if they will agree to a certain amount of advertising. There are free music download services being trialed in Europe right now, where music from top artists are made available free of charge if the user will agree to being exposed to a certain amount of adverts per track. Out of all the ideas so far, this is most likely to gain if not popularity, support with web users. At least they can choose when and where to expose themselves to more advertising rather than having to field it all day.
Offering things for free isn’t anything new, but if anything is going to make advertising more acceptable to an ad-weary audience it’s by making it worth their while. By offering something in return for time and attention a relationship can be struck between the advertiser and their audience. This may not only secure an audience for the adverts, but it may go some way to creating brand allegiance too.