FUD…Fear, uncertainty, and doubt. A famous sales tactic used by sellers to create doubt in the mind of buyers when it comes to their competition.

FUD has been used in the advertising industry on the local, regional, and national level so much that buyers don’t know who to believe anymore. Before the internet came along, radio, TV, and print salespeople all talked against the other mediums, trying to capture the lion’s share of each prospective advertiser’s budget in order to maximize their revenue. Each media salesperson is trained to talk against the other media…why radio and not TV, for example. I was trained to do this, too.

When the internet came along, traditional media reps quickly ratcheted up the FUD against the internet. And the FUDing doesn’t stop with media salespeople–agencies are just as bad. They FUD each other and FUD the heck out of mediums for which they are not staffed or have the technology or the data to buy.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 27th, 2009 at 9:06 pm and is filed under Advertising, Media Buying, Planning. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.