A lot has been made about the demise of print. Some of it justified...some not.

  I saw Tim Bingaman of CVC (Circulation Verification Council) speak at our Wisconsin Free Paper Conference in April. He said most of the decline in circulation and readership of newspapers was the fault of the metro dailies, (A fact many of us already knew.) Free and paid community newspapers have an entirely different story to tell.

  To prove his point, Tim suggested we go back and take our CVC audits from the last 10-15 years and graph our circulation, readership, etc. and share these stats with our advertisers.

  I emailed Tim after the conference and got our audit numbers back to 2003. Tim suggested I wait until our 2017 audit was completed in the next few months.

  When I got the 2017 audit and put all the numbers together I was amazed myself. All of our numbers either increased or remained consistent over the past 15 years. A very contrary story about print than the one you hear about in the news.

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  Whenever Nielsen releases its latest quarterly Total Audience Report, we see a lot of quick headlines quoting top-line data. But a more in-depth analysis reveals important insights into what's really going on.  
  I've looked over all the quarterly reports during the past three years, and here are some highlights.

  The early results from a recent study that Kent Grayson, a Northwestern University marketing professor, did on consumer skepticism left him feeling a little, well, skeptical.
  So he ran the trials a few more times. Each time, when participants were asked what they thought of modern advertising techniques, they answered with words like "credible," "fair" and "good."

  For online publishers, more advertising typically means more revenue. It's why websites are often crammed full of flashing banners, auto-playing videos, content-blocking overlays and widgets recommending sponsored story links. 
  But some publishers say they're now taking a "less is more" approach when it comes to placing ads across their sites. Stripping out irritating ad formats and limiting the number of ads forced on visitors can actually result in more engaged consumers and ultimately increased ad revenue, they say.

  Another installment in the tale of newspaper earnings woes kicks off this week. In reports on the second quarter, expect to hear CEOs tout how the growth of digital audience and digital subscriptions is a bright spot.
  But I have been harvesting some statistics suggesting that print circulation revenues are far from a side issue for these transforming companies.

  Marketers are expected to shell out $83 billion on digital ads in the US in 2017, according to eMarketer. And the more that advertisers spend, the bigger the opportunity for fraudsters. By some estimates, sophisticated ad-fraud perpetrators could cost the ad business over $16 billion globally this year.
  There are lots of ways that ad fraud can happen. 

  Here are two of them.
  When publishers lift their heads up from their tablets and smartphone screens, they should realize that there's not just life left in the print newspaper business model-there are opportunities to optimize print, thereby optimizing revenue.

  Artificial intelligence has been part of the zeitgeist for decades.  

  But now that the technology is moving into the media and marketing mainstream, industry professionals may wonder if they're about to be phased out by an army of machines.

  Most big brands like Heineken have gone from viewing advertising on Facebook and YouTube as a way to spur conversation around viral content to using it to catch hundreds of millions of people's attention. 

  In some markets, that's meant spending more on digital than it does on TV, according to Nourdin Rejeb, Heineken's global manager for digital.