Despite the decline in print sales, newspaper advertising can still have a big impact

The power of print is still with us

With declining newspaper sales and more and more people reading the headlines on their smart phones, it’s fair to say that many people believe that digital leads the way for the future of the news industry.

However, last week the power of print advertising was shown to still be strong. An open letter to the United Kingdom from Argentinean president, Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, was published in the form of newspaper advertisements in the Guardian and the Independent. They called for Britain to hand over the Falklands back to Argentina, in a colonial battle stretching hundreds of years.

The Sun retaliated on behalf of Britain and its readers by placing an advert in Spanish and English in Buenos Aires Herald, telling Argentina to keep their ‘hands off’ the British-owned islands.

The incident has, in fact, sent an influential political message, and highlighted the forthcoming referendum in which the inhabitants of the island will be able to choose who they wish to be governed by.

This isn’t the only example where print advertising has had a high political impact. Remember back to 2011 when News of the World published adverts of apology in every national newspapers after the phone hacking scandal?

In a thoroughly digitalised western world where over half of Americans receive their news online, it is significant to note the importance of print advertising. Though readership may be falling and its influence reining, a senior sales person for the Mirror recently informed a group of young journalists at a conference that she could sell a high key, full page, colour advert in her paper for a whopping £48,300, which shocked us all. Companies, charities and other organisations still want to pay for their logos in a paper format, as they believe it will aid their business.

On the students’ newspaper front, large companies still want to advertise with us in print (sometimes even more so than online) because they are guaranteed a certain audience, a certain print run, and can have a greater degree of control as to the output. Print advertising still makes up a high proportion of our overall sales.

Print propaganda has been around for as long as print has, and it’s still having an impact today in the form of newspapers. Though it is important to embrace digitization and forms of new media, do not underestimate the power of an advertisement in a newspaper.

Do you agree? Do print media and advertisements still hold power in today’s digital work? Tweet us @wannabehacks and let us know your thoughts.

Photo: United Nations

HuwLHopkins

Print advertising is powerful becuase you can see it. The headlines on the billboards outside newsagents, the stack of newspapers on display outside petrol stations. The visuality of the print media probably has a much more impressive sway, albeit unconsciously, on the public's opinion about a subject. On the internet you find people with the same opinion, but with the print, you're told what to think (although i appreciate people buy newspapers who's view they support). The power of advertising is huge at a national level, but regional newspapers are finding it a bit of an issue at the moment, however there is still money to be made, even if it means smaller adverts and lower ad fees for print publications.

chrishutchinson

On the point regarding student publication advertising, I disagree with the sentiment that companies can be guaranteed a certain audience through print. Using simple (and free) analytics software like Google Analytics, I can tell a company a lot more about who their advert will be seen by. Afterwards I'd be able to report back on how many times it was clicked, on what sort of devices, at what time of the day, where they were in the world. I'd argue that the web is the only real platform that can guarantee a certain, and targeted, audience.

For a company, those insights about who is engaging with their adverts is, in my opinion, far more valuable than a print advert.

In the next few years, businesses will realise they can use digital adverts (whether that be on Facebook, Google, or news websites) to target their customers in a way print can't. Those who are paying almost £50,000 for a print advert will soon stop spending that money.

mattpointblank

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Personally I'm not really sold by this argument. It's nothing new that print advertising is (for the moment) more profitable than digital, but that's partly down to how below-average digital newspaper ads are performing against the general digital ad industry: have a read of this page (and the depressing graph): http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/12/the-scariest-thing-about-the-newspaper-business-isnt-prints-decline-its-digitals-growth/266482/

Print ads are "dumb": they're much harder to target at the right people and harder to provide a "call to action" since they almost always require the customer to physically go somewhere else or contact a third party. Digital ads aren't perfect either but they at least solve some of these issues. Clinging onto print ads for the time being isn't a long-term strategy and fantasising that the decline in print ad sales will somehow reverse itself is pretty naive, too.

The examples you point to about the Falklands turf war are just political posturing; I don't think they reflect some inherent power in advertising. I doubt Argentina could afford a full-page takeover of multiple major news websites like they did with single-page adverts. Same with the NOTW apology; that was for the media/government; a PR thing, rather than specifically harnessing print's power: it's symbolic.

Not saying there's no value any more to print ads (yet) but that day isn't too far away now, in my opinion.

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