"Print is still a top-of-funnel medium," says Andy Blau, senior vice president of finance and advertising at New York-based magazine publisher Time Inc. "It's really for establishing brand worthiness in the marketplace, for establishing the value of the brand, for communicating very broadly, with broad reach, to the right target audience. It's really pure brand advertising. And digital tries to do some of that, but it's still much more of a direct response. People still measure digital with click-throughs and conversion rates, and you can't necessarily maintain marketing of a brand through digital alone. Print advertising is a very efficient way of establishing a brand identity and for communicating that to the target market."
Advertisers have to factor in longer lag times for measuring print ads' impact, Blau says, but it's worth it in the end because of print's longer shelf life and higher potential for reverberations beyond the initial reader. "There are methodologies for proving ROI for print, but it's not instantaneous like it is with digital for a variety of reasons: It's a physical product, it takes time to arrive at a person's house, it's there for a long time so there are many impressions, and there's a pass-along and an audience reach that accumulates over at least two weeks." In other words, patience is required, but it's possible that a print ad's value extends well beyond its CPM.
Leave it to a publishing executive to make the case for print advertising, but Fero agrees. "People are in different mental spaces when they choose to engage with a printed magazine versus digital content. Magazines, and print in other forms, serve as inspiration, and they also can be informational. A lot of that is title-dependent and reader-mindset-dependent. What does the reader want to get out of those five minutes that he spends with that particular title?
This is really where, in marketing, you can actually add value to a medium because the reader is looking for a very specific kind of content anyway, versus just talking about your brand. Print is becoming even harder, more competitive. It has to speak to the kind of content someone is really interested in."
