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Is Print Relevant Anymore?
June 11, 2007

Last week, Richard Romano blogged about the changing media mix and how marketers are faced with an ever-increasing barrage of media from which to choose for their marketing messages. “Part of the marketing problem is that, thanks to inexpensive electronics and display technologies, almost any surface can be a marketing vehicle,” he writes.

No kidding! From cell phones to gas pumps to the sides of mass transit buses, nearly ever flat, round, or virtual surface can be a space for your company’s pitch.

But really, it’s the Internet that is catching everyone’s eye. In fact, a new book, The Online Advertising Playbook, is designed to help marketers, especially those new to online advertising, maximize their marketing effectiveness by avoiding common pitfalls and focusing them in the most effective way. (For a summary of the article, see the article at On Demand Journal.)

This leads to the question: If we’re so focused on new media, what about traditional media? Specifically print? Where does print fit into this electronic age? If all of the eyeballs are focused on cell phones, PDAs, gas pumps, and computer screens, why even bother with all that “expensive” and cumbersome hard copy? Things change too quickly. Marketing messages need to be highly targeted. In this environment, is print even relevant anymore?

The answer is “yes,” but not the way you might think. Although we tend to think of on-demand information access and highly responsive, even real-time marketing and down-to-the-individual personalization as being something restricted to the world of wireless and the Internet, we can do the same thing with print. Yes, print! And print has a tangibility, credibility, and appeal the Internet does not offer.

Print can communicate on a 1:1 basis with customers—not just basic demographic targeting, but true 1:1 communication—and can even create a dialog with the customer. New document management models not only simplify print ordering, but reduce document management costs, improve branding consistency, and allow you to do highly targeted, customized, and even personalized marketing quickly and easily. 

Imagine being able to send out 1,000 postcards to your best customers, offering them special deals based on their past purchase history. You can vary the offer, the discount, the graphics, and even the pitch, based on something you know about each person.

What if you don’t have a good database of customers? You might try sending out 5,000 postcards to prospective customers, asking them to log into a personalized Internet landing page, where they can answer questions about themselves and their businesses, their needs, and product preferences, and track their responses in real time, following up on hot leads the minute they arise, instead of days or weeks later—or never knowing about them at all. Plus, the responses provide you with a highly qualified database of new prospects.

These types of applications are being produced every day, in the tens of thousands and millions, enabling marketers to dramatically overhaul how they communicate with customers and spend their marketing dollars. And the cost? Done right, you can actually spend less on your print campaign overall and bring in more revenues.

These marketing approaches are not restricted to big businesses with IT departments and large marketing budgets. The real brains behind their success are those producing these applications—the print providers themselves— and with the introduction of small-footprint, fully electronic presses, this approach has become accessible even to small and mid-sized businesses.

So if you think print is a dinosaur in light of today’s electronic media, you might be surprised. According to one of our recent surveys of the commercial printing industry, IM Printing #24, nearly half of all commercial printers (47%) now produce some kind of 1:1 printing, whether in color and black-and-white. And according to IM Design & Production #21, nearly one-third (27%) of all creative firms have produced a 1:1 personalized print job in the past 12 months. 

Print is really changing. Over the next few blog posts, I will take a more detailed look at some of these new models for print and how they can benefit your business.

Posted by Heidi Tolliver Nigro on June 11, 2007 | Comments (0)