You’ve been hearing it for years now—the last days of print advertising
are here. Social media, online content, e-books, and other virtual platforms
are the established channels of the marketing frontier going forward. Magazine
and newspaper ads will soon be ink-stained memories quickly disappearing in our
digital rearview mirrors, perhaps forever.
Well…perhaps not.
We can all see that print’s dominance as an advertising
medium has passed. But there are new approaches to print advertising bubbling up
that are injecting a surprising amount of reader engagement and interactivity onto
the page.
In the January 2014 issue of Wired magazine, Motorola featured an ad touting its Moto X
smartphone. One of the Moto X’s unique features is the ability for users to choose
the color of the phone’s body and buttons from a wide palette of colors. To highlight
this customization feature, Motorola designed the ad to enable readers to
change the color of the Moto X phone shown in the ad. The reader pulled a tab
at the bottom of the page to activate a super-thin battery. When the reader
touched one of 11 colored buttons on the page, the phone’s body appeared in
that color.
Nivea created a print ad for its sunscreen lotion that
included an actual phone charger. The ad featured an insert with a small solar
panel on one side and a plug-in charger receptacle on the other side. Readers
simply connected their mobile phone to the receptacle and turned the insert
over to expose the solar panel to sunlight, thus powering the charger.
In addition to new uses of print as an experiential medium,
there are several other reasons for its staying power. As a new generation has
become firmly entrenched in online communications and virtual experiences as
established norms, there is a growing desire for more permanent and tactile
engagement with the world. While the Web offers timeliness and wide
dissemination of content, it also lacks intimacy and a physical presence, both
of which print offers.
Another argument for print is that while it may no longer be
seen as the lead dog in most marketing campaigns, it can still be a highly valuable
member of the pack. Rent the Runway, JackThreads, and Birchbox are online-only
lifestyle and fashion retailers that are embracing catalogs as a part of their
marketing arsenal in order to be at more of their customers’ touch points
during the day. Whether you’re a traditional marketer or an e-retailer, it
always makes sense to spread your message across multiple channels than to rely
solely on one platform. And with more marketers cutting back on print
advertising, this naturally means that there are more opportunities to stand
out in print as well.
Finally, sentimentality is a factor that shouldn’t be
underestimated. Often, niche audiences gravitate to the past—look no further
than the resurgence of vinyl records. If a segment of your customer base
embraces traditional media and/or is skeptical of online communications, there’s
no reason to look past print. And given the almost daily occurrences of major
security breaches and hacking scandals involving digital media, it’s
understandable why people would want to take refuge in the analog world.
So talk about print marketing communications shouldn’t be in
the past tense just yet. It’s a perfect example of how something that’s perceived
to be old, when used intelligently, can be new again.
