So I’ve noticed the most anachronistic advertising recently, that sums up so much of the attitudes of ‘old media’:

I nearly got run over by a taxi getting this photo.

The message here is that your new-fangled, feature-packed, gizmo isn’t as good as your reliable, dead tree street directory. The problem with this is, with turn-by-turn, live route-finding voice recognition, GPS is in every mobile phone and subsequently every car, and most phones allow you to search Google Maps to look for route free and online when you’ve stopped. Which basically says, street directories are at risk of extinction.

UBD are an Australian manufacturer of street directories, and have been doing so for as long as I can remember. However, even despite UBD providing digital versions of their maps for use on CDs and DVDs they have very few ties to “In-car navigation devices”, and in their ads go so far as to try and sever these ties.

So why with all the efficiencies that GPS brings, and brand identity that UBD has did they never enter the GPS market, even to the extent to just attach their brand to devices for sale in Australia?

This question is moot, but serves to highlight the issues that a lot of companies do go through as the online space grows. As technology changes it will continue to enter more and more spaces, replacing books with fully browsable texts, stores with online distribution, the key is not to fight this but to ensure companies take what brand equity they had in their outgoing products and  use that to position themselves in the new markets that technology will unabatingly bring. Once people are used to the conveniences new technology brings, they will infrequently give them up, and fighting those tendencies will only serve to turn the public away, take the business models of the RIAA and MPAA for example.

Otherwise, you end up being like the company that were complaining that their business that did so well selling hay to stagecoaches needs a bailout to survive.