How Print Advertising Beat the Competition Through History

When print advertising first arrived on the scene, it didn’t have very much competition in terms of other forms of marketing media. There was print and… not much else other than sideshow vendors. But as technology and industrialization advanced, so too did the new forms of media, each time testing the ability of print advertising to continue breaking through the noise.

Today, print advertising remains a force in spite of so much competition for people’s attention. In the 1970s, people saw around 500 to 1600 ads per day. That’s a lot. That’s over 30 ads per hour, on the low end, assuming you’re awake 16 hours a day. But today, the estimates are that people see 4000 to 10,000 ads per day.

With social media and most other online channels, we’re frequently encountering multiple ads all at the same time. Combine that with walking down the street and the nonstop presence of screens, and you can believe those numbers are possible.

And yet — print advertising endures in spite of all this competition.

It’s worth your time to understand how, because print marketing can do things other media channels cannot, and that’s what ultimately explains print’s endurance in spite of being ‘written off’ so many times.

Let’s take a brief walk through history and see how print advertising responded each time a new media channel gave advertisers another marketing option.

Pre-1920s – print advertising stands alone

Up until the 1920s or so, print advertising had no competition. You could run ads in newspapers and magazines. You could hand out flyers and leaflets in the marketplace, in your own store, and at events. You could send direct mail.

Print advertising reigned, and it had no competition. The only competition was other forms of print media. And which choice you made depended on your products and which media you felt would get the attention of your ideal target audience. Yes, even back then, companies knew the importance of getting their message to the right people.

In his famous book Scientific Advertising, written in 1923, Claude Hopkins talks about the “disaster” of trying to advertise a product through the mail that only appeals to one out of a hundred people. If only 1% of people would even want your product, then far less than that will respond to the ad. You would need a better way to target them than blind mass mailing.

And in 1936, Charles Edwards and William Howard wrote this in their book, Retail Advertising and Sales Promotion, “No matter how attractive the advertising material may be, it cannot be effective — and is therefore largely wasted — unless it reaches logical customers.”

The Postal Service created third class mail in 1863, because enough companies were using the mail for advertising even by that time that it became clear they needed a way to classify it. From 1880 to 1930, direct mail grew from 300 million mailings to over 6 billion, a 20-fold increase.

During this time, marketers learned a lot about targeting, copy, headlines, incentives, benefits, and so much more about how to attract and convert leads into buyers and loyal customers. But it was all print advertising.

Until the advent of radio.

Radio – the first competitor to print advertising

Commercial radio got going in the 1920s, after some fits and starts that saw a number of amateurish stations coming and going in various cities. All of them struggled at first with how to monetize their work. But once they succeeded at showing companies how effectively they could advertise through radio, the medium took off and dominated the airwaves until the advent of television.

People listened to radio programs much like we watch TV shows today. Most were live at first because recording quality was so bad. That meant you had a captive audience who wouldn’t change the channel during breaks, because the idea of having set amounts of time for commercials took time to develop.

At first, some people argued vehemently against letting commerce invade people’s homes through radio. Yet, by 1930, it was as common as it is today. However, the form was very different. Often, the host of each radio show had to sell the products being advertised by their sponsor. In this way, it wasn’t that different from how YouTube broadcasters today often do their own version of product pitching in the middle of their shows, rather than as interruptive ads that can be skipped.

So radio advertising was captivating.

But, being only audio, there are certain things you simply can’t do with radio that you can do with print. In addition, print advertising had many decades prior to this where it had worked quite hard to master its craft and logistics. Print marketers knew what they were doing, whereas radio marketers took many years to master the new medium.

Thus, radio may have provided another media for advertisers, but it didn’t have much of an impact on the dominance of print. It’s also not difficult to have the radio on in the background while reading a newspaper or magazine.

Television – stiffer competition

Being a visual medium like print, but with sound, motion, and human personality, television advertising offers far more methods of communication than print.

In the 1950s, many TV shows had just a single sponsor, who had sole advertising authority for the entirety of the program. This still happens on rare occasion today, but back then, it was the norm. The idea of shorter 30 second commercials didn’t become common until the 1960s, when TV stations realized it made more sense, and more cents, to have more than one sponsor for each show.

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And the money multiplied fast. In 1949, when hardly anyone owned a TV set, advertisers spent $12.5 million nationwide. Two years later, it was up to $128 million. By 1955, it was over $1 billion. By 1977, television advertising brought in $7.5 billion — 20% of all advertising in the U.S.

So television took a larger and larger share of advertising budgets. Combined with radio, that left print advertising with a smaller piece of the pie. But even with these whopping numbers, if 20% of marketing is going to television, that leaves a pretty large share for print, which continued to expand throughout this time.

In fact, as this Atlantic article reveals, print newspaper advertising revenue grew almost continually up until around 2000, with a momentary drop in the early 1990s. And direct mail advertising didn’t hit its peak until around 2005.

Thus, while television certainly competed for attention with print advertising, it doesn’t seem to have impacted the money spent on print, or the variety of media that continued to flourish. The number of magazines in print didn’t begin to decline until the next major competitor.

Serious competition – internet marketing

As you just saw, print advertising revenue didn’t really decline until around 2000, which is when the internet matured into a viable form of media.

Because the internet offers so much more than television, it began stealing away attention from all other forms of media. Not just print, but radio and television as well began to struggle to maintain previous ratings dominance as the internet increased its ubiquity in everyday life.

But in terms of advertising, while fewer dollars are spent on print now than before the internet, the effectiveness of those ads sometimes tells a different story.

Many internet ads simply don’t get seen or responded to by the target audience. For example:

Display ads have quickly become background noise and garner very low response
Email marketing works well in some situations, but is a now-or-never medium
Social media ads scroll by so fast you hardly see them
Privacy rules have made some digital ads harder to target
Bots and scammers clog up the internet with viruses and spyware that keeps people from clicking
Promises to advertisers from internet companies fall short as their data gets called into question — how many supposed impressions are real people and not bots?

There’s a lot less trust with internet marketing than with print. And digital has far less staying power. So even though more money is getting spent with online marketing, and the targeting can be very good in some cases, many companies struggle to earn a viable ROI.

Printed front door marketing harkens back to the door-to-door salesman era, yet without the annoyance or pressure. Front door marketing is print marketing that gets attention and breaks through all the noise.

So, while the internet has done real damage to radio, television and certain forms of mass produced print media such as newspapers and magazines, you can actually still reach your target audience more effectively with print advertising than through the internet, using front door marketing for door hanger distribution. See our portfolio, with real door hanger campaigns and front door marketing samples.

Today’s primary competition with print marketing – the smartphone

In some ways, the smartphone has even eclipsed the broader internet as an advertising channel, because people spend far more time on their phones than on their computers. However, since the smartphone utilizes the internet, there is obviously some overlap.

That said, with SMS marketing, the smartphone offers even more channels to reach consumers than the internet does through a desktop or laptop.

And the problem is the same — getting noticed and making an impression. With such small screens, it is even harder to beat the marketing competition and get attention on someone’s smartphone than on their desktop.

There’s just not as much screen space, and it’s exceedingly easy to just turn off the phone or keep scrolling. Your opportunity as a marketer to get attention through the smartphone is very limited. The user must express interest in some manner, and you must capture that interest while it’s there.

With print advertising, you have more time to make an impression. Regular direct mail will get more consideration than an ad on a smartphone that the user scrolls by without even stopping. Direct mail gets handled, looked at, and considered.

And door hangers get even more attention because of their unique features. Power Direct’s door hangers are not the flimsy ones that fly away in the breeze and litter parking lots. Ours are large, sturdy, and offer many more creative options to advertisers, such as scratch-offs, free samples, and even some personalization for direct marketing.

In many ways, the fact that so many ad dollars get spent online gives print advertisers a bigger advantage than they had in their heyday. Now, with fewer advertisers using print to reach people at their homes, your ads get more attention, not less, than they would have 30 years ago. Flyer distribution gets better ROI than ever before.

Front door hangers and flyers get even more attention than mail because they feel more like receiving a package than a mailed advertisement. The large, unusual object gets brought inside and studied. It cannot be easily tossed in a recycling bin or trash can. It’s too big. It demands attention.

Take a look at our FAQ and learn more about how door hanger distribution can be optimized and maximized through targeting, analytics, and smart planning.

Learn more about the history of print advertising.