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True or False:
IT'S OFFICIAL, PRINT ADVERTISING IS DEAD
FALSE. Observing your shrinking home newspaper and your business trade journals, it would be easy to come to the conclusion that print is at least dying if not dead. Of course, the same death sentence was prematurely pronounced on radio in the 60s, when TV took off. The long-term prognosis for print is still very much up in the air.
Regardless of what ultimately becomes of print and print advertising, the “new” print advertising will play a different role than when print ruled in the B2B world. Before the internet, business trade journals were the primary vehicle for disseminating one’s message to their target audience. Over 3,500 trade journals could carry your message to any niche market from custodians to orthopedic surgeons. Most magazines had a reader response card (or bingo card as it was commonly referred to) in the back of the magazine where interested prospects could indicate the ads in which they were interested. Marketing and advertising managers could judge which magazines were producing the most leads by how many cards were returned. Savvy marketers would then follow up and determine the quality of the leads based on how many leads were converted into sales. This conversion rate was the magic formula for proving the worth of your advertising program. The stack of bingo cards was tangible proof that the advertising was working.
Over the past 10 years, most trade publications have dropped their reader service cards. Did readers suddenly stop reading trade magazines and, therefore, stop mailing in reader response cards or was there another explanation? It’s clear that today, if someone is moved by a print magazine ad, they will usually first go to that company’s website to learn more about the product and the company or, if they are very interested (a hot lead), they will call the company. Both of these actions are proactive and result in immediate answers. The old reader service card required a 2-week delay and the formerly hot lead was now many times lukewarm at best.
For the most part, print publishers have done a very poor job of explaining to would-be advertisers why their expectations should be different for print now than before. But different isn’t necessarily worse. A recent study* showed that 26% of marketers polled said that magazines are the most effective tools in driving web traffic. That’s more than broadcast or cable TV, more than newspapers, radio and out-of-home. In the B2B world, over 78% of readers say they were driven to the web prompted by editorial and ads in the pages of business-to-business titles. As you might guess, there is an age factor in all of this. Sixty-four percent of executives (presumably an older crowd) pay more attention to print ads than ads found online. A 2007 Hearst Business Media study stated flatly that “the more ads run in a business-to-business publication, the more readers will visit the advertisers’ websites”. Even Google, the hands down number one search engine, states “print advertising is a powerful display format for announcing sales and promotions, branding, targeting regional audiences and generating leads.”
What’s the missing link? Most companies have not established methods for tracking how their print advertising is resulting in increased web traffic. What’s more, the print publishers have not promoted the message or found a way to track it themselves (without taking the prospect through the magazine’s website first).
No, print is far from dead. But it does play a different role today. There is no longer a need to include everything about your product in your ad. The goal now is to entice the reader with your message and get him/her to your website where all will be revealed. Using print more like a billboard rather than an information piece is the position of the “new” print.
*CMP Media, 2006. Available at http://themagazinist.com/count_on_print.html