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