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Push Advertising vs Pull Advertising

Push Advertising is what traditional advertising is all about. Interrupt a viewer while he is watching television and push your ad in front of him, and the same goes for radio too. Or intersperse your content in the print medium (newspapers/magazines) with Ads. Basically push your ads on people using any communication vehicle. And it was ok for traditional advertising to be based on push advertising, because it was non interactive, and limited by geography.

But the Internet is completely an interactive medium, and more appropriate for pull advertising, because everyone is just a mouse click away.

Digital advertising presently is more of push advertising, wherein a brands ad is placed in sites that a viewer is visiting. Such ads by nature are interruptive and intrusive. And brands are getting disillusioned by the digital advertising solutions that are all technology led. Somewhere along the line, the fact, that brands need to tell a story was forgotten, and that a brands need to use rich media to communicate was ignored. Text ads, Banner ads, and the odd micro-site was not the solution, nor was reducing a brand to a thumbnail and a price.

Pull advertising is where the consumer on his own accord consumes brand communication or interacts with the brand. For instance, if he visits your website, or if there is an online game with a brands branding built onto it, and there are players wanting to play the game, or consumes entertaining content sponsored by the brand. Pull advertising is based on the principle of offering perceived free value, for the consumer to want to interact with the brand.

Some of the different forms of Pull Advertising is

Exhibition

Community Building Sites

Online Games

Entertainment content

Contests

Information content

Applications

Social causes

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Unlike Push Advertising, where the consumer might or might not be interested in your brand, with Pull Advertising you can be certain that the consumer is interested in your brand, or in the free value that you are offering him. Brand Marketers need to have a mix of Push & Pull Advertising strategies to make their brand successful.