Before You Tell Me That Print Is Dead - Remember: Amazon Launches Bookstores.

Remember when Jeff Bezos launched Amazon and planned on it being the death of retail and of books? Well, he can’t kill the book and he can’t kill the book store nor any other store for that matter. He is/was/is again the richest man on the planet. The first person to be worth $100,000,000,000 and he’s admitting his founding vision for Amazon is flat out wrong.

As well as launching Amazon bookstores, Amazon’s purchase of Whole Foods was about having physical shop spaces for retail across the entirety of America in one fell swoop.

There is a lesson in this about being pragmatic and adapting to reality if you want to run a successful business, but to me there is a more interesting story about the renaissance of paper and ink and all things real.

Businesses Are Returning To the Print Shop.

Many business owners are realising that online advertising is cheap for a reason. It doesn’t work as well as offline advertising. The most valuable customers are the ones who have read your book. The next most valuable tend to come from printed materials such as direct mail, magazines and newspapers. These people are taking physical things and reading them – something rarer than ever before – but the people who do it are valuable customers. Then comes customers from television and radio.

There are now more magazines in existence than ever before.

Everyone lost their minds when the internet came in and went online. Then they discovered two eternal truths.

1. If you don’t have a business model, you can’t stay in business. 99% of digital publishers are burning venture capital or have a wealthy patron subsidising their operating costs to stay afloat
2. Advertising is not as lucrative online for publishers – advertisers are only willing to pay about 20% of what they would spend for an offline ad online because the return on investment online is about 1/5 of the return offline.

Large Corporations spend a lot on advertising.

They also do sophisticated analysis on their advertising returns.

They’ve learned that you can’t build a relationship with someone who clicks on your ad and then clicks off somewhere else. They’ve noticed that the brand equity of the publication rubs off on their advertising. If they are advertising in a quality publication – they must be a quality product. It’s a good reason we should all be in good publications.

The next reason this helps is context. You can control more of the context that your ad is seen in. Right now YouTube is in all sorts of trouble because major brands such as Adidas and Netflix have had their ads showing in front of Neo-Nazi groups’ (and worse) YouTube videos. Then you get the reverse of this where ads for Kate Middleton’s Sex Tape were displayed on the New York Times’ website.

You never get this when a human has final editorial say.

If larger brands are going back to their analogue advertising roots, why are you trying to defy gravity by trying to advertise online? This is why we are here online but we also publish each in printed pages every month. 

Pay attention to what the most successful are doing and model what they are doing in order to achieve success.

Call us on 1300 85 77 85 to discuss your next print advertising campaign.