Lancaster, PA - no dot.com buses

From: Ramon Ray <ramon_at_smallbiztechnology.com>
Date: Fri 25 Aug 2000 03:00:40 -0700

I'm sitting in the Holiday Inn hotel in Lancaster
right now, on vacation with my family - heading back
to NY City in a short while. I've noticed that
unlike, NYC, there's few dot.com advertising.
There's almost no cellular phones ringing in all the
nooks and crannies of this small town, nary a Palm
in sight?

Nick Usborne recently wrote a ClickZ article about
"fly over land", the area in the US of America
between the big east coast and west coast cities...
well I'm in one of those "fly over land" cities now
and the low-tech atmosphere is amazing. This is not
to say that Lancaster or other towns in "fly over
land" are backward hick, tobacco chewing ghost towns -
but it does mean that those of use who are advertising
online, just plain advertising our online properties,
or advertising online our offline properties need to
really consider WHO we want to reach, HOW we want to
reach them and the BEST medium to reach them with.

I was supervising my children as they were playing in
a children's area in a Lancaster mall. As they were
playing I took some time to utilize the Sierra AirCard
300 wireless PC Card (with Go.America's wireless
service) and HP OmniBook I'm evaluating. From the
middle of the mall, I was able to work on some email
and access Web sites. But guess what no one else
had so much as a cell phone in their ears!

This should be a loud wake up call to advertisers -
before you start even thinking about a flood of
wireless cell phone advertising, bandwidth breaking
rich text adv or other bleeding edge advertising
solutions, consider that there's more to America
than New York City, NY and Los Angeles, CA - there's
48 other states to think about. and some people just
live normal, low-tech lives.

Ramon Ray, Editor/Analyst
http://www.smallbiztechnology.com
Author, "Small Business Technology Survival Guide"
http://www.smallbiztechnology.com/smallbiztechguide.htm






Received on Fri Aug 25 2000 - 05:00:40 CDT