Advertising beyond walled gardens - Part 5: Print with Adwanted

As our series continues to promote media diversification beyond Walled Gardens, Adwanted has accepted the challenge to talk about print today. Every cycle announces the great death of traditional media, as we saw for TV in part 3 of our series, yet there is still a great trust and engagement coming with the Print as a channel. It brings the opportunity to a longer and more content-rich approach to media, which can lead to more consideration and loyalty.

Gabrielle Oddone, Marketing Executive at Adwanted to help us understand why Print is a chooser. 

Lauriane Tiard-Caillaud from MMT in an interview with Gabrielle Oddone from Adwanted:

Gabrielle, thanks, for taking the time, to help our readers understand why Print is still a media channel to consider, especially when scaling out of walled gardens. Why advertisers should choose Print?

The first newspaper was published in 1631: like Outdoor, it is a historical media, which has reinvented itself through multiple crises and actually became a pioneer in digital. This media still attracts new actors and every year some bold entrepreneurs launch print media brands. First of all, Print has one of the higher memorization rates among all media and a great attention rate. Brands can really benefit from this media for their promotion. Its attention rate is exceptionally high and reaches up to 40%. As a result, it’s the second-best media in terms of attention following Cinema. Furthermore, it benefits from an excellent memorization rate e.g. 10% for print vs 5,7% for online videos.

In my years as a teacher, I remember presenting La Gazette. When we now talk about Print publishers, it includes both its paper and its digital format version as we tend to believe that the original content is the same. The digital extensions also have programmatic ads, outreach campaigns, and dedicated social media channels to exist in all spheres, let’s focus on the paper version for now.

What are the major benefits of Print when compared to walled gardens?

First, Print is a trustworthy media. For example, in France, 48% of the population believes information released in Print. It can be a media close to its audience. Brands can advertise and reach a very specific audience. Unfortunately, AdBlockers are still a thing and it can ban digital advertising. In 2018, 28,7% of the French were using an ad blocker. Some of their audience are higher than they really are. Bots represented 50% of internet traffic in 2017.

This is why media brands are very committed to their audience certification, in both Print and Digital. In France, the French Association for Newspaper and Magazines has created the Digital AdTrust certification, a label to certify their audience. Two-thirds of the certified websites are Print media brands.

In Germany, even 57% have trust in Print media. The trust in Print media content is almost correlated to the trust in the politician's integrity, isn’t it? The media is considered so powerful that it is often the first that authoritarian regimes try to control. But I am diverting. As you explained paper versions, like books, have the gravitas that digital ephemera feeds cannot keep up with, even the digital version of print titles. What are the major benefits of Print when compared to the other non-walled gardens?

Print is a unique media amongst non-walled gardens. It’s the only media with benefits from a pass-on rate (not only one person will read a copy, think about your dentist waiting room) after its publication. When advertising on TV or Radio, brands will pay for the number of spots and have no opportunity anymore for replay (since recording on VHS is dead, even that was anecdotal). Each spot will be played once per purchase. Print has a long shelf-life, which is actually also measured and permits ads to live longer.

We can also target audiences based on the thematics of each publication, make a national or a regional targeting, and even a city or a neighbourhood. Interest-based audiences have become a big driver of print renewal and offer a high engagement level.

Print is also a content-rich media, which offers the opportunity to bring complex matters to the consumer/reader, as one is already focussed on the reading without particular distractions. Some businesses and brands require being able to bring their immersive stories to life and Print is the right platform for it.

Yeah, the “captive audience” effect you bring here is interesting: people subscribe or buy specialist titles to get information on a selected theme, you suggest that they are loyal and trustful of the selected titles. What are the constraints of Print e.g. production costs or lead time?

Print in its paper version requires a “copy”, a static ad which is an image, a photo, or a text that conveys the brand's desired message. The production of an ad can vary extremely: from homemade for a few euros to million-dollar photographic work with superstars.

One general obstacle to Print is the lead times: a title has to be physically produced, shipped, and delivered. The publishers have improved their capacity to accommodate shorter streams but there is still a stiffness due to the actual needs of physical delivery.

Eventually, Print is a multitude of actors, publishing houses, and contacts. Adwanted’s constraints were to adapt to hundreds of years of habits. Change management has been a huge part of our process but our tools offer to help provide a digital-like experience in the buying at least: access to inventory, formats, positions, and direct contacts to the publishers.

Yes, Print ad production, especially in Fashion or automotive, has had extremely high budgets. Some simple ideas have high-cost executions and vice-versa. The Corona crises had stopped a lot of productions from going overseas and forced creative agencies to … be creative under amazing constraints! Improving the lead times is an important factor of changes, the market has to be more agile and decisions are made at a faster pace but hurting some longer-term engagements on the way. It is good to see Adwanted helps to smooth the process. How is Print measured?

Measurement is often seen as a problem in Print as we cannot physically watch the people reading the pages. However, there are numerous ways to measure Print campaigns efficiency.

• Unique reach and coverage of an audience (including multiple readers on the same title)
• Overlap from titles
• Subscription rate
• Engagement rate (through coupons, surveys, QR codes)
• Sampling to sales
• Pre and Post-test

How does Print duplicate with walled gardens? How does it extend it?

Social media is used by publishers to extend the reach of their content. Their existence is intertwined as they provide a part of the content that some walled gardens distribute at a cost. Also, as for Print, some social media have groups of similar interests, aficionados of particular hobbies, and products that mirror specialist titles that exist across the board. It doesn’t duplicate with walled gardens per se. Using both walled gardens and Print can be a great way to promote a brand. When creating a campaign, a lot of advertisers choose to create a 360 advertising campaign and advertise in all kinds of media to reach all of their targets.

Sure, I can only support extending to more media channels as it is the entire goal of these series. I believe very much in the leverage of interest that attracts more engagement and the unparalleled focus that a Print reader has. We can definitely say that print is a unique way of reaching an audience. It has been there for hundreds of years and has survived many crises. When used in an omnichannel campaign, it is a solid pillar for branding to advertisers. Gabrielle, thanks for taking the time to bring it to life today.

MMT offers a publisher management solution that helps agencies and advertisers to keep track of the best offers from their preferred business partners. Always highlighted in the planning sessions, these offers can be automatically selected, inventory requested, and booked in a few clicks. MMT Mercury allows us to link with external measurement and invoicing systems to reconcile billing when the campaign ends.

We hope you enjoyed the interview with Gabrielle Oddone from Advanted and that you were able to take away useful information for you and your company. To discuss your individual challenges and how you can scale outside the walled gardens with our leading media management platform MMT Mercury, I am available for a personal meeting.

Sources:

• https://www.statista.com/statistics/1087447/trust-in-printed-media-news-europe/
• https://www.abc.org.uk/
• https://www.printpower.eu/insight/why-print-media/
• https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/153801/umfrage/allgemeines-vertrauen-in-die-presse/
• https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/01/bots-bots-bots/515043/
• https://www.la-croix.com/Economie/crise-Covid-19-reconcilie-peu-Francais-medias-2021-01-26-1201137240
• https://www.emarketer.com/content/ad-blocking-in-france-2018
• https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/01/bots-bots-bots/515043/