With all the hype and hoopla about Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, and the next generation of mobile digital technologies that promise to change the world forever, you could be forgiven for thinking that the days of print are numbered. Doom-laden think pieces bemoaning the death of print are a staple of industry columns worldwide, and could easily have you believing that traditional print media is going the way of clay tablets and vellum parchments.

In this piece, we’ll be exploring a radically different point of view. Though there’s no putting the genie back in the digital bottle, print remains a vibrant publishing and advertising medium if you take it seriously and do your research. Print media have also been forced to radically up their collective game by the arrival of digital, and there are excellent deals and opportunities available at all points of the pricing spectrum.

Let’s kick things off with a quick recap of what makes print media so special in the first place.

In a Wildly Distracted World, Print’s Hold on Attention Is Unique

Fans of print have long claimed that the medium is consumed in unique ways, and that it activates a completely different part of user engagement than digital alternatives – the science is increasingly there to support that view. People actually use a different part of the brain when reading offline, and the result is deeper focus and more concentrated attention.

While digital has enormously expanded the reach of content, that ubiquity has come at a price. Successive waves of both platforms and devices have essentially trained users to skim and skip at an ever increasing rate. In terms of actually making an impact with advertising of any kind, that’s potentially very bad news. It’s also a big factor behind the need to relentlessly hammer home a message time after time after time on digital. You’re fighting for micro-seconds of attention in an incredibly crowded space where a complete change of context is only ever a click away.

With print, on the other hand, readers have actually been trained to focus and hold their attention over centuries. The result is a medium that’s still incredibly effective in terms of advertising when done correctly. Whether you’re after mass market or luxury consumers, print still lets you reach and influence people in a completely different way from digital.

Print Trends Are Negative But There Are Plenty of Opportunities for Advertisers in Australia

Though print remains a uniquely engaging medium, there’s no point in sugar-coating the reality of what’s happening to the industry around it both worldwide and in Australia. To cut a long story short, digital continues to make massive inroads that show no signs of slowing down.

There’s no two ways about it, print media incumbents are going to continue to take a hammering, and print advertising revenues will continue to fall. From the point of view of you as an advertiser, however, that’s very much someone else’s problem. In fact, we could go further and say it’s actually an opportunity for a large range of businesses.

The battle for attention online is brutal and consumes the waking hours of most marketing and sales departments. With focus drifting away from print, and the industry itself increasingly on its knees, there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit out there for those who are prepared to strategically add print into their overall advertising mix. In terms of both inventory and pricing, it’s a buyer’s market if you know where to shop.

If you’re looking for a partner who can help you maximise opportunity across both print and digital, our expert team are ready to take the call. We’ve got a complete understanding of the wider media landscape across Australia and can help you craft a perfectly balanced overall strategy that delivers the best from print and digital. Get in touch today to start mapping out options for both!