Sean Milmo, European Editor09.17.19
There are signs of a comeback by print in Europe amid indicators that the massive surge in the popularity in online media may soon have reached its peak.
After several years of steady decline, the circulations of many newspapers and magazines are beginning to stabilize and, in some cases, are even increasing. There is mounting evidence that direct mail can have a more lasting effect than promotional email.
The momentum behind the apparent revival in print is stemming from new printing technologies, in particular inks and coatings, which have not only been able to improve visual impact but also the haptics or touch and other physical characteristics of printed surfaces and their substrates. Publishers are looking to transfer to their sector some of the new haptic printing and ink technologies recently developed for packaging.
The Feel of Printing
Print is regaining some of the ground it has lost to digital in the media sector by taking more effective advantage of its physicality, which is seen as being its intrinsic advantage over online information. A growing amount of scientific data is confirming that touching printed surfaces and substrates has a significant influence on how the human brain responds to them, particularly with regard to any printed information they convey.
The haptic effect has been helping to maintain the popularity of printed books against competition from e-books.
In the five years to 2018, the value of sales of physical books in the UK, one of Europe’s largest book markets and also its biggest exporter of books, went up by 8% while exports in the same period increased by 7%. Sales of children’s books went up by 3%.
Between 2014-2018, UK publishers’ revenue from consumer e-books dropped by one-fifth but non-consumer digital book sales increased by a quarter.
Last year, sales by value of books in the UK fell by 7%, but this was mainly because of a drop in prices. In terms of book units, sales went up 1%. Digital book sales rose by 4.6% in 2018 in the UK, but this was mainly because of a sharp rise in audiobook sales, which are categorized as “digital.”
Marketers in Europe are now more aware of the psychological benefits of print technologies in comparison with the narrower advantages of digital.
“Print is giving me a chance to be really creative,” said Helen Bazuaye, global editor-in-chief of the customers’ magazine of IKEA, the international furniture retail chain.
“It’s giving our team an opportunity to think about the best way to tell a story and how to bring (the magazine’s) pages alive,” she told a roundtable discussion of marketing specialists organized by Brussels-based Print Power.
Brand owners, retail companies and marketing and media agencies in Europe are seeking ways of making use of new printing technologies in customer magazines and other publications.
“Print has credibility and trust as a media source, which digital often does not have,” said Elizabeth Stone, marketing manager the UK retail chain John Lewis, at the same meeting. “Print can harness its strengths through this credibility.”
Internet Advertising
Internet advertising is continuing to grow rapidly. In March, Zenith Media, a leading media agency, raised its forecast growth for global internet advertising expenditure over the next three years from an annual average of 9% to 10%. This will mean that by 2021 the internet will account for more than half of all global ad spending.
However, in July the agency revealed that its analysis had detected an imminent “substantial slowdown” in the growth of maturing internet ad spending. By 2021 it expected internet ad spending growth to have fallen to 9% year on year as the growth rate of the internet ad market starts to match the growth rate of the market as a whole, according to Jonathan Barnard, Zenith’s London-based head of forecasting.
Major sources of internet advertising expenditures are beginning to shrink. Online classified advertising, which grew at 9% globally in 2018, will, for example, contract to 1.6% global growth in 2021, per Zenith. The majority of big brands are spending most of their advertising budgets on traditional media so that an increasing proportion of internet ad spending is being made by small companies.
At the same time, consumers are losing confidence in digital media because of worries about fake news and other reliability issues. Print publishers, in particular, see opportunities to capitalize.
“There is a great deal of public anxiety about content online and the impact it is having on society,” said Dan Conway, UK Publishers Association’s external affairs director.
“This is where the book industry has a role to play. Publishers are the guardians of truth because of our rigorous approach to content selection, enhancement and production. We are also the experts in high-quality, edited content, which can prove an antidote to the modern crisis of trust in information online.”
With the public losing faith in digital, print could provide an effective platform for building up the image of individual brands. Marketers and advertising agencies are realizing that they have been relying too much on the strategy of using online advertising to boost sales while neglecting traditional media, especially print, to achieve other gains like greater brand awareness.
The predominant marketing trend at the moment with a predominance of digital advertising is the activation of plans centered on persuading consumers to buy products.
“Effectiveness is maximized when 60% of the (marketing) budget is spent on brand building and 40% is spent on sales activation,” said the UK Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA) in a recent report on “Marketing Effectiveness in the Digital Era.”
“Activation is increasingly believed to be the most effective use of advertising so more money is being put into activation channels,” the IPA pointed out. “But this has now gone beyond the optimum 40% of the budget and so, in fact, is reducing effectiveness and efficiency.”
What is needed is more emphasis on long-term planning to bolster or establish brands through the use of mass multi-media marketing, in particular, print media, the report suggested.
“Mass marketing is working better than ever for those firms that use it to its full effect,” the IPA says in the report. “Press advertising might seem a particularly antiquated medium in these digital times. However, the IPA data shows that press advertising still works. Campaigns that include press in the schedule tend to be more effective than those that don’t.”
A broadening range of innovative print and ink technologies are available to provide the visual, tactile and other sensory impacts to meet the needs of long-term brand-building plans of print-conscious marketers.
Publications backed by investment in high-class editorial content and quality printing tend now to be the ones in Europe which are performing well.
In the second half of last year, most of the UK’s top 10 women’s lifestyle and fashion magazines increased or maintained their circulations year-on-year with the help of high standard editorial content and printing.
In many European countries, the popularity of print is reflected in the number of long-established relatively low-priced consumer magazines that are continuing to achieve sales of millions of copies, mainly from street kiosks.
Throughout the region, there is now a greater mix of consumer magazines ranging from high-circulation publications, magazines covering specific hobbies and sports and customer publications, many of them using digital printing processes to make them highly personalized.
The trend towards quality graphics has been shown by the success of niche magazines with an emphasis on striking visual, tactile and sensuous effects. Some of these ironically have to be ordered online since they are not available at magazine retailers.
Italy has become a center for Europe’s growing niche magazine sector due to its tradition for publications on design and fashion. The Italian men’s magazine IL was originally founded by the country’s business newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore. Its editorial and managerial independence from the paper has now enabled it to become one of the most famous Italian magazines in the world with a reputation for pioneering innovations in graphics.
The challenge for publishers now is to disseminate the design expertise of niche publications across the sector. This could coincide with making more use of the printing and ink technologies developed in packaging.
A growing number of press equipment manufacturers in the packaging sector now have machines providing haptic effects because of the increasing demand for them in sectors like beers and beverages, foods and cosmetics.
Ink producers have been helping to deal with application difficulties with haptic inks and coatings by drawing up metrics for matching formulations with specific tactile effects.
Hubergroup “wanted to get away from just screening raw materials in a trial and error process and identifying the one with the right haptic properties more or less by chance,” said Lars Hancke, the company’s business development manager for flexible packaging.
Instead, hubergroup has developed a more systematic approach based on a method for measuring haptic effects in other industries like textiles. This has enabled it to correlate haptic and formulation parameters and to match the optimum printing parameter with the desired haptic effect.
Perhaps the touch and feel effects of ink and curing innovations in packaging will in time be transforming segments of publishing as well.
European Editor Sean Milmo is an Essex, UK-based writer specializing in coverage of the chemical industry.
After several years of steady decline, the circulations of many newspapers and magazines are beginning to stabilize and, in some cases, are even increasing. There is mounting evidence that direct mail can have a more lasting effect than promotional email.
The momentum behind the apparent revival in print is stemming from new printing technologies, in particular inks and coatings, which have not only been able to improve visual impact but also the haptics or touch and other physical characteristics of printed surfaces and their substrates. Publishers are looking to transfer to their sector some of the new haptic printing and ink technologies recently developed for packaging.
The Feel of Printing
Print is regaining some of the ground it has lost to digital in the media sector by taking more effective advantage of its physicality, which is seen as being its intrinsic advantage over online information. A growing amount of scientific data is confirming that touching printed surfaces and substrates has a significant influence on how the human brain responds to them, particularly with regard to any printed information they convey.
The haptic effect has been helping to maintain the popularity of printed books against competition from e-books.
In the five years to 2018, the value of sales of physical books in the UK, one of Europe’s largest book markets and also its biggest exporter of books, went up by 8% while exports in the same period increased by 7%. Sales of children’s books went up by 3%.
Between 2014-2018, UK publishers’ revenue from consumer e-books dropped by one-fifth but non-consumer digital book sales increased by a quarter.
Last year, sales by value of books in the UK fell by 7%, but this was mainly because of a drop in prices. In terms of book units, sales went up 1%. Digital book sales rose by 4.6% in 2018 in the UK, but this was mainly because of a sharp rise in audiobook sales, which are categorized as “digital.”
Marketers in Europe are now more aware of the psychological benefits of print technologies in comparison with the narrower advantages of digital.
“Print is giving me a chance to be really creative,” said Helen Bazuaye, global editor-in-chief of the customers’ magazine of IKEA, the international furniture retail chain.
“It’s giving our team an opportunity to think about the best way to tell a story and how to bring (the magazine’s) pages alive,” she told a roundtable discussion of marketing specialists organized by Brussels-based Print Power.
Brand owners, retail companies and marketing and media agencies in Europe are seeking ways of making use of new printing technologies in customer magazines and other publications.
“Print has credibility and trust as a media source, which digital often does not have,” said Elizabeth Stone, marketing manager the UK retail chain John Lewis, at the same meeting. “Print can harness its strengths through this credibility.”
Internet Advertising
Internet advertising is continuing to grow rapidly. In March, Zenith Media, a leading media agency, raised its forecast growth for global internet advertising expenditure over the next three years from an annual average of 9% to 10%. This will mean that by 2021 the internet will account for more than half of all global ad spending.
However, in July the agency revealed that its analysis had detected an imminent “substantial slowdown” in the growth of maturing internet ad spending. By 2021 it expected internet ad spending growth to have fallen to 9% year on year as the growth rate of the internet ad market starts to match the growth rate of the market as a whole, according to Jonathan Barnard, Zenith’s London-based head of forecasting.
Major sources of internet advertising expenditures are beginning to shrink. Online classified advertising, which grew at 9% globally in 2018, will, for example, contract to 1.6% global growth in 2021, per Zenith. The majority of big brands are spending most of their advertising budgets on traditional media so that an increasing proportion of internet ad spending is being made by small companies.
At the same time, consumers are losing confidence in digital media because of worries about fake news and other reliability issues. Print publishers, in particular, see opportunities to capitalize.
“There is a great deal of public anxiety about content online and the impact it is having on society,” said Dan Conway, UK Publishers Association’s external affairs director.
“This is where the book industry has a role to play. Publishers are the guardians of truth because of our rigorous approach to content selection, enhancement and production. We are also the experts in high-quality, edited content, which can prove an antidote to the modern crisis of trust in information online.”
With the public losing faith in digital, print could provide an effective platform for building up the image of individual brands. Marketers and advertising agencies are realizing that they have been relying too much on the strategy of using online advertising to boost sales while neglecting traditional media, especially print, to achieve other gains like greater brand awareness.
The predominant marketing trend at the moment with a predominance of digital advertising is the activation of plans centered on persuading consumers to buy products.
“Effectiveness is maximized when 60% of the (marketing) budget is spent on brand building and 40% is spent on sales activation,” said the UK Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA) in a recent report on “Marketing Effectiveness in the Digital Era.”
“Activation is increasingly believed to be the most effective use of advertising so more money is being put into activation channels,” the IPA pointed out. “But this has now gone beyond the optimum 40% of the budget and so, in fact, is reducing effectiveness and efficiency.”
What is needed is more emphasis on long-term planning to bolster or establish brands through the use of mass multi-media marketing, in particular, print media, the report suggested.
“Mass marketing is working better than ever for those firms that use it to its full effect,” the IPA says in the report. “Press advertising might seem a particularly antiquated medium in these digital times. However, the IPA data shows that press advertising still works. Campaigns that include press in the schedule tend to be more effective than those that don’t.”
A broadening range of innovative print and ink technologies are available to provide the visual, tactile and other sensory impacts to meet the needs of long-term brand-building plans of print-conscious marketers.
Publications backed by investment in high-class editorial content and quality printing tend now to be the ones in Europe which are performing well.
In the second half of last year, most of the UK’s top 10 women’s lifestyle and fashion magazines increased or maintained their circulations year-on-year with the help of high standard editorial content and printing.
In many European countries, the popularity of print is reflected in the number of long-established relatively low-priced consumer magazines that are continuing to achieve sales of millions of copies, mainly from street kiosks.
Throughout the region, there is now a greater mix of consumer magazines ranging from high-circulation publications, magazines covering specific hobbies and sports and customer publications, many of them using digital printing processes to make them highly personalized.
The trend towards quality graphics has been shown by the success of niche magazines with an emphasis on striking visual, tactile and sensuous effects. Some of these ironically have to be ordered online since they are not available at magazine retailers.
Italy has become a center for Europe’s growing niche magazine sector due to its tradition for publications on design and fashion. The Italian men’s magazine IL was originally founded by the country’s business newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore. Its editorial and managerial independence from the paper has now enabled it to become one of the most famous Italian magazines in the world with a reputation for pioneering innovations in graphics.
The challenge for publishers now is to disseminate the design expertise of niche publications across the sector. This could coincide with making more use of the printing and ink technologies developed in packaging.
A growing number of press equipment manufacturers in the packaging sector now have machines providing haptic effects because of the increasing demand for them in sectors like beers and beverages, foods and cosmetics.
Ink producers have been helping to deal with application difficulties with haptic inks and coatings by drawing up metrics for matching formulations with specific tactile effects.
Hubergroup “wanted to get away from just screening raw materials in a trial and error process and identifying the one with the right haptic properties more or less by chance,” said Lars Hancke, the company’s business development manager for flexible packaging.
Instead, hubergroup has developed a more systematic approach based on a method for measuring haptic effects in other industries like textiles. This has enabled it to correlate haptic and formulation parameters and to match the optimum printing parameter with the desired haptic effect.
Perhaps the touch and feel effects of ink and curing innovations in packaging will in time be transforming segments of publishing as well.
European Editor Sean Milmo is an Essex, UK-based writer specializing in coverage of the chemical industry.