Marketing Manner

With the economy now officially in a recession, the outlook for print advertising budgets looks grim. But according to Robert Thomson, managing editor of The Wall Street Journal, advertisers are “slowly returning.” Thomson told the Reuters Media Summit in New York: “You’re starting to see them emerge in the sunlight after this period of darkness.” Thomson believes that advertisers are looking to use more conservative, comfortable outlets to communicate with consumers.

With the instability of the Internet, “People are looking for a safe harbor in times of turbulence.” If this is true, newspaper and magazine publishers would welcome the news, since they’ve had so many cutbacks in advertising budgets in the past year. The advertising budgets were already scarce enough before this sluggish economy.

Newspaper and magazine circulations have been declining since people get their news online anymore. So many advertisers have cut print budgets in favor of the Internet that some analysts think that some U.S. newspaper may even fold in 2009. (I know I’ve seen headlines just this week about weekly newspapers folding, so dailies might not be too far behind.)

Digital information is still big business for many companies, including WSJ parent Dow Jones & Co. But at the same time, print advertising is still a valuable moneymaker for many companies. Although display ads on Web sites are reaching a lot of people’s computer screens, that doesn’t necessarily mean that people are paying attention to them. Thomson believes that advertisers are starting to recognize that people ignore display ads because they are looking at other parts of the screen that sap their attention. Newspaper and magazine ads may be more valuable because you can’t click out of them like you can online ads. Print ads aren’t as intrusive as many Internet ads. It’s easier for people to get distracted, surfing from page to page and it seems that if they notice the ads at all, it’s only because they’re annoyed by them.

Advertising in the luxury market haven’t been hit too bad, but it’s inevitable according to Nick Brien, who is the CEO of Interpublic Group’s Mediabrands, a holding company for media buying and planning agencies. Even millionaires and billionaires are losing money, which doesn’t mean much to the average Joe, but going from having 1 million to half a million is still a loss.

As a result, advertisers will be hitting print – it’s been the reliable advertising venue for years and in this unstable economy, advertisers don’t want to take too many risks.

I don’t know the future and I don’t know what will ultimately become of the print medium for advertising. Perhaps in enough years color printing truly will be a thing of the past that no worthwhile marketer will bother with.

I do know a few things about history though that would suggest it isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. After all, radio ads didn’t put it to rest, nor did TV commercials topple print advertising as the king of marketing. Now online advertising is making a play for dominance over the world of marketing, but based on what I’ve seen in the past, I have a feeling that the print world is more than up to the challenge.

Why has traditional marketing survived this long to still stand proud in the world of marketing? Radio and TV didn’t topple it for the same reason that the internet isn’t going to right now.

Not everyone had access to a radio when it was first introduced, or not everyone really cared to listen to one. That meant anyone who didn’t have a radio was automatically not going to hear that ad, which meant you were cutting yourself off from a certain part of the population.

The same is true for TV. It took a lot of years before they spread to be in nearly every home, yet even now they aren’t really in every single home there is. And even in the homes that do have a TV, not everyone watches it that much, or pays attention to the commercials on it.

The same is true for the internet. While computers have spread rapidly over the past ten years, not everyone owns one, and even fewer people actually have an internet connection. I’d say that yes, the majority of homes probably have some form of the internet these days, but that still isn’t all of them, and that’s still a portion of the population you’d be cutting yourself off from.

Here’s the thing about print advertising: a person doesn’t need to have anything in order to be handed a flyer on the street. They don’t need to pay a single cent to buy a computer or TV in order to pick up a brochure. All of those other forms of marketing require a person to spend money in order to get the equipment needed to view the marketing.

With printing you’re footing the bill for all of it and simply handing a person the advertisement. You do all the work and they get to benefit from it by reading what you have to say. The world of print advertising requires the least amount of effort from a person, and that’s why it has stuck around for so long.

Maybe that will change, but I don’t see it happening anytime soon.