September 10, 2007
Print in the Mix Gets Industry Coverage

The following is an excerpt from an article by Barney Cox, "Putting Print's Power Across," which recently appeared in Printing World (http://www.printweek.com/):

"Last year the US's Print Council launched its first campaign to promote print to the marketing community in America. Why Print?, a printed brochure highlighting print's qualities, was rolled out at print trade show Graph Expo.

But appealing to the senses, and by extension the emotions, is only one half of the battle. Simply saying that print looks good and can do some things that grab the viewer's attention is not enough to persuade marketers to use print; a more rational, factual approach is also needed.

Effectiveness is the key word. Measuring the response to a piece of marketing has always been important to the people with the purse strings who want to make sure that they are getting value for money. Historically, the problem has been in measuring that effectiveness easily and cost-effectively.

At the heart of the question is the availability of tools that make it possible to track the effectiveness of communications. There is a pressure to extend the kind of efficiency expected in finance, manufacturing and logistics to marketing.

'A big part of the rise in internet marketing is because internet trackability is inherent,' says Pat Sorce, administrative chair of the school of print media at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), New York State, US. 'It's threatening every other media due to trackability.'

Sorce agrees that there needs to be more done to promote print as a medium: 'Press coverage about the media is dominated by online and new media. We need to get across the important facts about print's effectiveness.

'If you look at the statistics for the growth of marketing media, then direct mail, customer magazines and magazine page advertising all show growth, but not the double-digit growth of new media. Print is still huge and has reasonable growth, and we want to remind people of that.'

Commercial potential
In the executive summary of her [research monograph], The Case for Print Media Advertising in the Internet Age [PICRM-2006-02, available at http://print.rit.edu/], Sorce reports that one study of the top 100 US advertisers found higher correlations between a firm's sales and its print advertising than broadcast (television and radio) advertising. Another study found that magazine adverts were more effective than television advertising in promoting sports utility vehicles (SUVs) over a 10-year period; another found that printed newspaper advertising generated a higher recognition of the content than the same ad online. Other research highlighted in the executive summary found that a combination of TV and direct mail produced the best sales for a food franchisor and a study of the most influential sources of information for purchasers found that after word of mouth and sales reps, print advertising was the most or second most effective influencer in a number of product categories.

The Print Council and [the Printing Industry Center at] RIT have jointly launched a website called Print in the Mix, which is described as 'a clearinghouse of research on print media effectiveness'. The site summarises relevant research, providing links to the original source materials as well as providing bite-sized facts. Prior to the formal launch this month, some of The Print Council's members have been testing the site and already their sales reps have started to use the materials in their presentations.

The aim is to make the site more comprehensive and to expand it to a global resource. 'We've already got six American universities involved and we've sent out invitations to other international print media universities to join,' says The Print Council's Vinyard.

RIT's Sorce sees understanding data and a client's communication needs as essential for printers who want to prosper.

Client communication
'When you're bidding as a printer you're at the last stage of the media buying process when all the planning has been done,' she says. 'By then it's just a commodity. If you get closer to the client you can ask more about what they want from the communication process. That demands that print sales people know a fair bit about media, advertising and campaigns - and a very important part of that is about understanding data.'

She identifies data as a skill printers lack. 'The level of understanding of data of most print firms is that they're learning how to use a spreadsheet,' she says.

Part of the problem is that the message printers have heard about data for the last decade is about the use of variable data for personalisation, which is only a part of a wider issue.

'It is really about the whole perspective of data,' says Sorce. 'It's about qualifiable ideas and quantifiable information on the impact made by print. The printer has to be able to prove the effectiveness of the job they produced,' she says. "

About Print in the Mix
Print in the Mix (http://printinthemix.rit.edu) is a web-based clearinghouse of information and research on the effectiveness of print in advertising and marketing. It contains a collection of statistical information and research on all areas of print including direct mail, magazines, custom publishing, newspapers, etc.

Print in the Mix, is published by the Rochester Institute of Technology’s Printing Industry Center and is funded by The Print Council.