The Female Entrepreneur Magazine January 2016 January 2016 | Page 15


 The Female Entrepreneur The easier and more affordable it became to print materials, the more businesses began creating flyers, posters, pamphlets, and business cards. Enter in direct mail marketing and coupons in the "Sunday edition." How The Golden Age of Technology Changed Hyperlocal Marketing As modern technology gave birth to radio and television, only a few companies with large advertising budgets could reach into the living rooms of families across the country, thereby mass penetrating every hyperlocal area where people had TVs. But even this technology became more advanced and affordable with the birth of cable: local communities could be served information, updates, and advertisements with much more targeted information than ever before. Businesses who could never afford (or needed to) to advertise to a nation-wide market over the air waves suddenly could advertise on cable spots, sponsor a local show, or even run their full-length talk on cable networks like Channel 8, "Reston Community Television.” In the early 1970's when Reston Cable TV was one of the first communities to have their own hyperlocal cable company. Ads and announcements were placed on cards similar to index cards and inserted into a rotating device (that looked like a large rotating Rolodex wheel.) As the ad wheel rotating rotating. As the cards rotated on a a timer, a camera focused on them and the ad images were magically transformed into one of the first examples of hyperlocal marketing in Northern Virginia living rooms. For early cable subscribers who manually had to get up and switch from A to B cable (and, long before remotes were even available) this low-tech cable ads really were still quite impressive. The Female Entrepreneur, Page 24