If you talk to any small business person, they will tell you that traditional marketing is not paying off for them. In other words if they advertise on cable TV, or in the newspaper, or even on the local radio station, it’s simply not bringing in the number of customers they need to survive in their business considering the cost.Yes, it’s true that during the recession the cost of advertising have come way down, but that’s only because they aren’t pulling anymore and there are fewer people willing to advertise therefore those media outlets have to lower the price. Of course if the media outlets and the entrepreneurs and small-business know that this isn’t working, there will be even fewer participants in these forms of marketing and advertising.Before retirement I was the founder of a franchising company and our franchisees used all sorts of advertising and marketing methods, and I can recall that even 20 years ago these forms of advertising and marketing didn’t really work, or they didn’t work very well for what we were doing. Remember in a franchising company each individual franchisee is a small company, not a large company – and they couldn’t quite handle the economies of scale needed for a mass marketing or advertising blitz.Even when we did this at the corporate level by pooling an advertising fund, we were never quite satisfied with the results, yes, we did get measurable results but nothing overwhelming or extremely notable. Oh, I can’t say that, there were a couple of advertising blitzes that helped, but mostly not.Indeed, there have always been advertising representatives willing to get a new account with a small business, and they often promised them that they would see results, but they never really did, and certainly not to the degree they were promised. And thus I ask, as many of the large media outlets are having challenges trying to stay in business – has traditional advertising ever really worked for small business people?Unfortunately, I would say it hasn’t really ever work as well as it should for the small business person, and it should be no surprise that it works even less during a recession when there are fewer buyers in the marketplace. A small business person has to do what works, rather than just doing what is considered the traditional norm in advertising. Indeed I hope you will please consider this.