martinibuster - 11:49 pm on Jun 3, 2010 (gmt 0)

To many kind of business before internet they could work wihtout advertising...

Maybe the liquor store on the corner didn't advertise back in the days before the Internet, but most other businesses still invested in advertising. Before the Internet I ran the retail operation of a local business and increased sales fourfold by advertising on the back pages of local community newspapers across multiple cities and towns, including placing classifieds in the two main newspapers in San Francisco.

Yellow Pages was the biggie. If you weren't in the Yellow pages then you didn't exist. Back then a typical large city had more than one newspaper and advertising in the papers was imortant, too. But there were other smaller places that local businesses advertised in, too, like the back pages of church missals, sponsor logos on bingo cards, that kind of thing. That's how plumbers, vacuum repair shops, restaurants and video stores got the word out- sometimes motivating consumers with coupons.