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When Charlie East was starting out in the advertising business in the early 1980s, agencies frequently used a tactic called “road blocking” to ensure their ads reached as many people as possible. They’d buy commercial air time on the local network affiliates, then run their ad on all three stations at the same time.

“It was really pretty simple,” says East, who now heads communications for Louisiana Workers’ Compensation Corp. “There was nothing else to watch, so you knew everybody would see it.”

It’s hard to overstate how dramatically the media has changed over the past 25 years. In broadcast, print and advertising, digital technology and the Internet have revolutionized the industry, reshaping almost every facet.

“We’re still trying to get our arms around it,” WAFB General Manager Nick Simonette says. “I suspect what we’re doing today will be very different from what we’re doing five years from now.”

Simonette has seen the changes in his industry and remembers the very different world of local TV that existed 25 years ago. On the technical side, there was no digital media; everything was analog. Local stations were still making the transition from film to videotape in the early 1980s. As a practical matter, that meant heavier, bulkier production and editing equipment and much slower turnaround time for producing local programming and commercials.

On the business side, there was a lot less competition for ad dollars. The three local TV stations—WAFB, WBRZ and WVLA—were the only game in town, which is why media buyers like East could effectively reach the entire viewing audience by putting the same ad on all three stations at once.

True, cable TV was starting to make inroads with local viewers, but it wasn’t significant. More importantly, there were no local advertisers on cable. Cox Cable didn’t start selling commercial air time locally until the early 1990s. What’s more, there was no competition from satellite TV or the Internet, and the concept of news on demand was the stuff of science fiction.

“There’s absolutely more competition for ad dollars today than there was back then,” says John Spain of the Baton Rouge Area Foundation, who was news director at WBRZ in 1982. “Today’s new technologies allow advertisers to target their messages at even more specific groups by using specific cable channels for viewers who like cooking, sports or NASCAR racing, and younger people can now be reached by placing ads on popular Web sites.”

Back then, local radio was a different animal, too. There was no competition from satellite radio, with its dozens of super-specialized formats. There were, however, more locally owned stations. Over the past 20 years, a handful of large national chains—Clear Channel, Guaranty and Citadel—have gobbled up virtually all the stations both in this market and nationwide.

From a sales perspective, that’s made it easier to place buys and target specific listeners. But it has taken from radio all its local personality. It has also spelled the demise of local news on the radio. In the early 1980s, WJBO, WLCS, WIBR, WAFB-FM and even WLUX (the Jimmy Swaggart-owned religion station) all had news directors. Now WJBO is the only one that does.

“The sound is more generic with consolidation, and the commitment to news has diminished,” says Jim Engster, general manager at the Louisiana Network.

Print media has also undergone seismic shifts. Twenty-five years ago, the now-industry-standard Mac on which newspapers and magazines are graphically designed didn’t exist. Articles were typeset and pasted up on boards, as were hand-drawn ads. It was a slower, time-consuming process. As a result, there were fewer specialty publications, niche magazines and special advertising supplements. It was just too expensive and too much trouble to print them.

There were two newspapers: The Morning Advocate and its evening counterpart, The State-Times, which went out of print in 1991. Though both were owned by the Manship family and published in the same building, there was a sibling-like rivalry between them that some say made for better, more aggressive news reporting.

Of course, back then, the newspapers enjoyed a prominence they have lost, since the Internet and 24-hour cable news outlets have enabled readers to get the day’s headlines long before the morning paper even goes to press.

“I can sit at my computer and read The New York Times and The Guardian of England,” says Jay Perkins, an associate professor at LSU’s Manship School of Mass Communication. “Why do I need the national news section of The Advocate?”

Technology has also dramatically changed the world of local advertising. From the agencies’ perspective, it has made their jobs simpler and more efficient in some respects. In terms of producing ads, for instance, consider 25 years ago it would take weeks to design an ad, send it back and forth to the client for edits, send it off again to be formatted for printing at a special service bureau, then ship it off for printing. Today, proofing can virtually be done on a Mac desktop.

“Even just a few years ago we were still sending runners to New Orleans or Lafayette to look at proofs,” says Otey White, who opened his advertising agency, Otey White and Associates, in the mid-1980s. “Today, we do it all electronically.”

To an extent, electronic proofs have helped agencies operate more efficiently. But it has also raised client’s expectations; they now demand more from their agencies.

“You do it faster, but they want it quicker,” communications consultant Jeff English says. “A lot of people have unrealistic expectations about deadlines.”

Technology has also made it easier for small, so-called boutique agencies to thrive in the local market. That’s a big change from the early 1980s, when there were a handful of prominent players who handled all the big accounts. Some large agencies shut down when the oil and gas boom came to a screeching halt in the mid-1980s. Others lost their biggest clients when banks began consolidating and hiring national agencies. Whatever the causes, smaller specialty shops sprang up in their place, and in the past decade, smaller groups have taken off because of digital technology.

“The technology has perpetuated the boutique industry,” White says.

Whether all these changes have been positive depends on perspective. For advertising agencies and PR firms, technological innovations have presented opportunities to compete in an arena that wasn’t open to them 25 years ago.

“There are more people in the media industry making money today than in the past,” White says. “It’s not controlled by just a handful of powerful players anymore.”

But with so many new and competing platforms for information delivery, ad revenues are splintered into fewer pieces, which does not necessarily mean higher quality news stories, ads and other types of creative products. The media is different, though not necessarily better.

“There’s more media today in Baton Rouge than existed 25 years ago, a lot more,” Perkins says. “But all this means more media outlets are chasing advertising dollars, and that means less money for anyone to do quality work.”