Print ads can express great ideas.
They’re just hardly ever worth the money.
This is a pretty ad. Unfortunately I have no idea what it’s trying to tell me. I’m pretty sure dentists won’t know either, since mostly they practice in offices, not fields.
A few months ago I got a call from one of my clients, who was excited. “I got an email from a business magazine and they want to do a feature on us! I told them you’d get back to them with all the details.”
Neither of us had ever heard of the magazine, but that didn’t matter. As long as they’re not asking my clients to pose naked or offer opinions on religion, I’m happy to take PR where I can get it. And we’d had a lot of media exposure in mainstream channels in the previous 12 months, so I wasn’t surprised that we were getting the call.
So I called the ‘editorial assistant’ who’d contacted my client. We discussed the feature (4 pages! with photos! and case studies!), and the various angles we could pursue. I investigated the magazine (something to do with ‘women in business’), which seemed legit, if a little obscure. Over the course of 2 or 3 weeks, I provided detailed responses to questions, information about the business, and even provided the names of a couple of clients they could contact for ‘commentary’.
But then the sales pitch started: They wanted a list of my client’s suppliers (with contact information), and I started getting emails from a sales manager type ‘recommending’ that we purchase a half-page ad to accompany our ‘feature’.
Finally I got a bit annoyed, and called the editorial assistant. “Look,” I said, “you pitched this to my client as a proper feature article. Now I’m getting the impression that this ‘feature’ is entirely dependent on us or our suppliers spending a lot of money.”
She denied it, of course…but after a couple more emails from the sales manager guy, we didn’t hear anything from them.
It’s all about the opportunity cost.
These days, most of my clients are small businesses who don’t have a single dollar to waste on marketing. So spending $5000 for a half-page ad in some obscure business publication whose distribution is basically a mailing list they bought in 2006 just doesn’t make sense.
I always think about what else I could do for my client with that $5000: I could host a networking event with good snacks, create several webinars, do a direct mail campaign, create a mobile version of their website – or my client could take 50 clients for fancy lunches, during any of which I know she could generate more business than she will through an ad in some magazine that no one ever reads.
Sure, print ads sometimes have their place.
Don’t get me wrong – I know that for some brands, print advertising works, especially as part of a larger campaign. Big luxury brands can get a lot of mileage out of spreads in Vanity Fair or GQ, and from what I see on YouTube (where bedroom walls can often be seen in the background), kids are still cutting out ads from magazines to use as posters. Heck, I even had this Hermes image as my computer wallpaper for a while. Ads like these, which look like print ads but mostly live online, can generate a fair amount of brand awareness.
And I also know that even in this digital age, there’s something kind of cool about being able to pull out a printed publication and point to your very own advertisement. For small business owners, especially, it can confer a sense of credibility, like “Wow, I have a real company, and here’s the proof.”
But ultimately, the goal of advertising – as a part of a larger marketing strategy – is to sell more stuff, and at the end of the day, a single print ad just isn’t going to do it for you. So the next time someone calls you about advertising in a magazine you’ve never heard of, just say “no, thank you”. I promise you’ll have made the right decision.