Advertising, as we know it, is dead. Actually, if you're a design type, it may have never been alive to begin with. Architects, for example, were forbidden from advertising for decades, which was only permitting it in their codes of ethics in recent decades in most places. We've just discussed why conventional marketing methods for design types are broken... but what are you gonna do... turn to print advertising? You've gotta be kidding... when is the last time you've heard of an architect getting a job from an ad they put in the newspaper?? C'mon... that simply doesn't happen!

The only print advertising that can do you any good is in publications focused enough, and with a passionate enough following, that they'll actually figure that if you're savvy enough to advertise in their favorite niche publication, you're savvy enough for them. Restore Media is such a company; their Traditional Building and Period Homes magazines have just such a following. But for general-audience print advertising, you can forget it.

Radio is no better than general-audience print... does anyone even listen to the radio anymore? People are far more likely to have "time-shifted audio media." In other words, albums and audiobooks they can listen to at their convenience, and on their own schedule, with no commercial interruptions. TV is much the same... you can download your favorite shows to your iPhone or iPad, and watch them when you're ready, rather than when the networks say you should watch them.

The worst type of advertising you might contemplate is spam. If you advertise in the newspaper, on the radio, or on TV, people will simply ignore you... or never be there to hear you in the first place. But if you spam them, they'll detest you. Matter of fact, there's likely no better way to make sure that someone never does business with you than to spam them.

Spammers have created a huge unintended consequence that will change business for at least the next generation, if not forever: They have conditioned us to delete their unwanted interruptions to a degree nobody ever anticipated. Our delete keys have grown a hair trigger. If something even has the whiff of spam in the subject line (forget the body of the email) we hit Delete and it's gone. Don't waste our time! We won't tolerate it anymore!

The spammers have so firmly conditioned us to reject them that a curious thing has happened: Nobody wants to hear about your business anymore. They won't tolerate talk about your company. They haven't the slightest interest in your mission statement, your vision statement, or your business plan. Just forget it... they're not listening. You might as well be talking to a brick wall. I call it the Spam Vaccination. (That's my term, but not my idea; the idea originated with Seth Godin... great guy... if you don't follow him and his books, you should.)

So if conventional marketing doesn't work, and advertising doesn't work, either, what's a design type to do? There are actually many reasons for hope, and we'll discuss them in the next several posts. As a matter of fact, this oncoming age of great necessities may be the best thing that ever happened to you. Just don't think that you're going to get there doing thing in the conventional way.