Print Media Advertising

The current landscape of audience fragmentation, Internet advertising, and required accountability for advertising expenditures is exerting great pressure on the ability of main-stream, ad-supported media to survive. The purpose of this month’s research monograph, The Case for Print Media Advertising in the Internet Age (No. PICRM-2006-02), by Patricia Sorce, Ph.D., chair of RIT’s School of Print Media, and graduate student Adam Dewitz, is to determine what we know about the effectiveness of printed advertising media. It finds that print media will survive and grow to the extent that it can prove, with each new advertising campaign, that it can deliver an acceptable return on the advertiser’s investment.

The Media Environment in the U.S.

The monograph begins with a review of the media usage patterns of U.S. adults. A January 2006 Advertising Age magazine article reported that in 2005, the average American over the age of 18 consumed a total of 9 hours, 35 minutes of media per day—44.5% with TV; 27.8% with radio; 5% each with the Internet, newspaper and recorded music; and 6% with magazines and books combined.

Figure 1. Media consumption of the average U.S. adult in 2005 (Lindsay, 2006)
click to view full size

The overall TV audience is segmented into various groups defined by age and interests, and yet television viewing is still the “average” citizen’s choice for media-related leisure. The main-stream media forms of television (both broadcast and cable) and newspapers remain at the top of the advertising expenditure ladder. But a study by the private equity firm Veronis Suhler Stevenson indicated that the combined expenditures for print advertising in newspapers, consumer magazines and “business papers” represented about 40% of all advertising media expenditures in 2004. 

Table 1. Measured media expenditures in 2004 (Veronis Suhler Stevenson, 2004)
click to view full size

While this study estimated Internet advertising expenditures to be only about 5% of the total amount spent on advertising, Internet advertising is expected to grow at an average annual rate of 24% over the next five years. A recent study by McKinsey & Co. found that, while real ad spending for prime-time broadcast TV advertising increased by 40% in the last ten years, the audience had shrunk by nearly 50% during the same period. With decreasing circulation and audience sizes, it is becoming more difficult to make the business case for adding more advertising dollars in main-stream media.

Assessing the Effectiveness of Advertising

Measuring the impact of advertising is critical today, and in fact it has been a top concern of advertisers for over 100 years. A now famous quote by John Wannamaker, a department store owner in the early 20th century, demonstrates this point: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is, I don’t know which half.”

It is difficult to link the direct impact of advertising on buying behavior in even the best of research programs. While some buying situations may find the consumer actively gathering information to form an opinion and then act, this sequential behavior is not common. Isolating a purely affective response from a consumer to advertising is difficult if not impossible.

How Print Advertising Compares to Other Advertising Media

The relatively few research studies that have examined the impact of advertising in different media show that print advertising performs well compared with other media. For example:

• In a 2001 study of the top ten advertisers, higher correlations were found between a firm’s sales and the amount of print advertising it bought vs. sales and the amount it spent on broadcast advertising.
   
• Magazine advertising was more effective than network TV advertising for promoting SUV brands over a ten-year period.
   
• People who were exposed to printed newspaper advertising had a higher recognition of ad content than those who received an online version of the same advertising message.
   
• For a food franchiser, the best sales resulted from advertising media spent concurrently on primary direct mail and national TV advertising.
   
• In a 2005 Doubleclick study, the most influential sources of information affecting purchase decisions overall were word-of-mouth and salesperson contacts. But for individual product categories, printed advertising was the most influential source of information for consumers who purchased personal care / home care products, and the second most influential source for those who purchased consumer electronics and home improvement products.
   
• In a survey of 4,500 newspaper readers sponsored by the Newspaper Association of America, 78% reported that they used newspaper inserts to plan shopping, and 76% said that inserts helped them save money.
   
• The Direct Marketing Association (DMA)’s 2005 Response Rate Report showed that dimensional mail yielded a 5.4% lead generation rate (vs. email at 3.27%), and co-op shared mail produced a 5.47% direct order rate vs. 4.16% for Internet banner ads.

While these studies show the effectiveness of print advertising, more robust methodologies for measuring advertising’s effectiveness must be developed in this new era of accountability. A danger in relying solely on direct, near-term response measures to advertising (such as interactive media like the Internet, for example) is the tendency they foster to overemphasize media consumption situations where consumers are ready to buy.

New Approaches to Media Selection

New media metrics may help media planners and buyers select appropriate advertising media forms. One new audience response metric is a single source database called Project Apollo, which combines “Portable People Meter” advertising exposure data with a “Homescan Panel,” whereby participants scan items purchased when they return from shopping trips. A pilot study of Project Apollo indicates that the technology can link advertising exposure to the buying behavior of people in the study.

Briggs and Stuart take a different approach with a proprietary research methodology that tested the effectiveness of 31 advertising campaigns. They controlled the exposure of various versions of ads to certain groups of consumers (and included a control group with no ad exposure), and then tracked changes in brand awareness, attitudes, and intentions to buy, measured both before and after ad exposure. Using predictive modeling, they can then recommend a change in media mix that they claim will lead to the optimal lift in buying intention within an existing budget.

The American Association of Advertising Agencies declared in 2005 that “engagement,” defined as a brand idea or media experience that leaves a positive brand impression, would become the new metric for advertising accountability. But a drawback to this metric is that additional data gathering, post exposure, would be needed to make the ROI link—also a problem with standard media metrics like measuring brand awareness and brand preference. Whether you ask an awareness question or an engagement question, the cost to capture post-advertising data would be the same.

Conclusion

Going forward, specific advertising media platforms will survive only if they can demonstrate advertising effectiveness and efficiency. Main-stream media forms will remain viable if they can be competitively priced, based on audience size. Print media sellers need to understand the media consumption activities of their clients’ target audiences to be able to make the case that print can deliver the results they expect.

2006 Research Monographs:
To read about this research in detail, download the monograph from: http://print.rit.edu/pubs/picrm200602.pdf

Research publications of the Center are available at:
http://print.rit.edu/research/