Print Advertising Still Viable

In today’s highly sophisticated world of advertising it has become the norm for advertisers to seek alternative media forms until they find the venue that gives them the greatest return for their advertising dollars. Televised advertising is under siege from advances in digital video recording that make skipping commercials altogether not only a possibility but a simple reality. Although it is waging a war to remain relevant to consumers, print media remains one of the most stable of the advertising media formats.

In the world of print, magazines tend to edge out newspapers in advertising effectiveness. Too many newspaper readers simply scan the headlines so that their eyes pass right over the ads. Magazine readers choose their magazine purchases by interest and taste thus making it much easier for advertising agencies to place attractive print ads in targeted venues where they will be well-received.

Print catalogs have also increased in popularity as an advertising venue because they marry their print offers to an online presence. All major retailers who send out catalogs make it possible for would-be buyers to visit their online stores, enter the product code for an item, and order it with a credit card and a few clicks of the mouse. This is a beautiful example of a traditional print medium blending itself with the technological innovation of the Internet in a highly successful partnership while still offering traditional phone sales or order forms to their less techno savvy customers.

Print direct mail offers may actually have regained their edge over mass email transmission of similar materials due to the enormous public reaction against so-called “spam” or junk email. Since much of this spam is for physical enhancement products or sexually explicit services found offensive by an overwhelming majority of people (especially parents of young children), software products to block the reception of unsolicited emails have proliferated at an exponential rate. The popularity of these software packages has made direct email marketing much more difficult.

Although much has been made of the “paperless” world of the future, this transition, if it occurs at all, will be a long time in the coming. The swing away from paper and toward alternative media forms has begun to stabilize back toward the middle. It would appear in the thriving advertising climate of the twentieth-first century a blending of traditional paper-based ads and online, electronic sources will become the norm.

Magazines do appear to have edged out newspapers in effectiveness of print ads and traditional paper-based mass mailings are, for the time being, more likely to reach the intended recipients than electronic mailings. While business owners and others seeking to place advertising for promotional purposes are still advised to shop around and find the venue best suited to their product or service, print media should not be discounted when planning an overall advertising campaign.

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