Print's not dead yet!

Happy 2010! We celebrated the new year in New York City with our most cosmopolitan friends. We dined together on our last night in the city and during the obligatory conversations about work, we went in to the print vs. digital communication discussion. Around the table were experts in magazine advertising/publishing digital advertising/web analytics, branding/customer engagement, a small business owner whose newfound passion is marketing and lead generation and myself. In each of our industries there are roles that print plays that digital cannot (at least not so far.)

We talked about the appeal of a weighty, glossy fashion magazine and the way the ads almost dominate the content. Contrasted to a website where we all admit to having very little recall of any of the online ads. In my husband's business, mailers don't bring in as many new patients as his SEO efforts, but printed pieces work better to keep current patients coming in. The context of this conversation eventually turned to the fact that we all can leverage our "age advantage" to learn these trends faster and more thoroughly than our superiors, prove our contributions in the context of each of our industries and secure our jobs.

For me, this has extra meaning because the parent company I work for is a printing company at its core and is learning to build other capabilities. Stein is far ahead of this curve, and has proved to be the source of much digital know how. So when I saw this article from the Boulder County Business Report titled "There's still a role for print in digital world," it made me think of the stance many of us have taken with clients. We still encourage them to invest in viewbooks, brochures for parents, and direct mail campaigns. Often this is for the tactile appeal, and we even recommend thicker paper to further capitalize on the feel of the books. Print can convey substance in a way that digital cannot.

The article notes the other advantage of print, that it allows for a sense of discovery. In print, we "run across articles" we weren't expecting, but online, we only really search what we KNOW we want to look for. Again, in the case of search, we're soliciting students who might not have any knowledge of an institution. They may not have ever considered a school that they had not heard of beforehand, and so let's impart some real information to them, enough to get them to keep looking.

Finally this author comes to the conclusion that we all have: craft an integrated strategy, utilizing the medium that can have the most impact. Market leaders are not the ones with only an innovative online presence, but the ones leveraging equally sophisticated print materials as well. Does this hold true for our clients in education? Or are they scaling back the print side too much? Are a few postcards going to work as well as more in-depth materials? Is it just as easy for our audience to click delete as tossing a viewbook in the trash?