Google and Facebook are often where businesses begin digital advertising.
There's a good reason for that. They provide enormous audiences, sophisticated advertising tools and relatively accessible ways to start reaching potential customers.
But they're not the whole advertising landscape.
If your business is ready to reach customers in different ways, there are considerably more options available than many businesses realise.
Advertising across websites
Display advertising allows businesses to reach people while they read news, sport, entertainment, lifestyle and other content online.
These are the image and banner advertisements you see across websites and apps.
They can help businesses reach audiences beyond people actively searching for them and can be useful for building awareness, introducing an offer or reconnecting with previous visitors.
Online video
Video advertising can appear across YouTube and many other online video environments.
It gives businesses an opportunity to communicate more than can usually fit into a search ad or static image, making it useful when the message benefits from sight, sound, movement or demonstration.
Streaming television
Television advertising is no longer restricted to businesses buying traditional broadcast TV campaigns.
Advertising can appear while audiences watch television and streaming content through internet-connected televisions and devices.
That can combine some of television's strengths, including a large screen, sound and an entertainment environment, with greater audience selection and campaign control.
Streaming music, radio and podcasts
People spend significant amounts of time listening to streamed music, radio and podcasts.
Audio advertising can reach them in those environments, often at times when visual advertising isn't competing for their attention.
Digital screens in physical places
Digital advertising isn't confined to personal devices.
Digital screens appear across shopping centres, transport environments, retail precincts, gyms and many other physical locations.
This is commonly called digital out-of-home advertising.
It can be useful when location, physical presence and repeated exposure are relevant to the marketing problem.
So which should you use?
Possibly none of them.
The existence of a channel isn't a reason to spend money on it.
What are we trying to achieve that our current marketing isn't achieving?
Different advertising environments create different opportunities.
The job is to understand the business problem, the audience you need to reach, the message you need to communicate and the economics involved.
Then choose the media that makes sense. Not the other way around.