e-Bay print ad

Are you aware that e-Bay and Yahoo advertise recently on traditional media channels like TV and prints ? It's an interesting phenomenon if we come to think about how they started their business. Yes it's the Internet. The Internet was considered to be a medium that would eat up the share of traditional media. Has this happened ? Yes but only to a certain extent. We are still overloaded by traditional media. There are more magazines. There are more ads at the MTR stations. There are more product placements in the TV dramas. And there are more short 10" TV infomercials where we are confused of what they are trying to sell.

Coming back to the Internet brands. They are business models on the Net, trying to sell us something, like brick-and-mortar shops. Utilizing traditional media to advertise in order to draw traffic is not a bad idea. But the key has become how they will ride on their brand image built on the Net to build their brands in traditional media. Such "brand translation" is not easy.