Print vs AI marketing: In an Increasingly AI World, Print’s Value is Greater than Ever

With the advent of AI and all the content it’s beginning to “produce,” consumers are becoming increasingly wary of the content they see online. Artificial intelligence has invaded numerous industries from art to accounting, and trust in digital media is cratering. As a result, the real and perceived value of print media is enjoying another resurgence. 

So how is AI damaging the connection between companies and customers, and how can print advertising keep your customers receptive to your marketing content?

Benefits of print vs AI

To answer this, let’s begin with a quick look at the ways print marketing is superior to AI generated marketing content. And to be clear, there’s nothing inherently wrong with online marketing, but there’s growing distrust on every platform as users come to understand how easy it is to manipulate social feeds and spread information that can’t be verified.

Print campaigns have these competitive advantages over marketing produced by artificial intelligence:

Longevity

Digital and AI-generated ads flash on the screen while you’re busy doing other tasks. You may or may not look at them. Then, they disappear and are gone forever. Oftentimes, you never see the same ad again. Even though you might potentially have some interest, if you don’t take action immediately, your opportunity may be gone forever.

This is why conversion rates with display ads, and social media ads in particular, are so horrendous. The average conversion rate for display ads across all industries is 0.55%. For social media, it has hovered around 1.3% for quite some time. 

Compare that to a postcard. 

Now, a postcard is not the most effective form of print media. Door hanger distribution like what Power Direct specializes in engages more potential customers and leads. When you see something on your front porch, you will look at it. Your impression rate will be nearly 100%. With those kinds of numbers, your conversion rate can’t help but be better, too.

But even a postcard has far more permanence than an online ad. 

You can engage with it right away, or set it aside and return to it later. You can show it to your spouse and look up the website printed on it.

More work to produce

By its very nature, print media requires more time and labor to create. Once a large print project is created, you can’t adjust it without incurring substantial expenses. With greater care and attention required to produce print media, the quality is higher and the recipient assigns greater value to what’s in their hands than they ever will to online ads.

More trustworthy 

A recent article wrote about the increasing value of print media as a result of generative AI. They discuss the idea of “proof of trust,” and that print inherently has a greater amount of this because of the expense and labor required to produce it.

Internet users trust online media even less than they did before because it’s too easy to suspect an ad is generated by AI. This trust gap between brands and their customers is only going to grow with respect to online media. The cheap and effortless nature of AI-generated content erodes trust in businesses that depend on it. 

Higher costs

Yes, higher cost is a point in favor of print media. Why?

All it takes to send an AI media campaign is to press buttons on a keyboard, touch a screen, or click a mouse. Many legitimate businesses are doing this more and more — putting less and less effort into their digital media productions.

To send a print media campaign, you must invest in printing, ink, paper, postage, and some sort of distribution network. 

The higher cost of print increases trust because it weeds out disreputable and amateur media producers. When big companies rely too much on AI, it decreases trust in the whole system. 

How can AI companies be worth billions in the stock market, and yet their services are ‘free’. Users see that and recognize that something doesn’t add up. Higher costs for print mean legitimacy.

More useful

When you get coupons in the mail, you can flip through them, take out the few that might apply to you, and decide if you want to use them later. You don’t have to “act now” before the ad vanishes forever. Again, you have the benefit of time due to the greater amount of permanence. 

Door hanger marketing pieces do this even better because they’re not so easily discarded with the mail. 

But all physical advertisements are useful. You bring it to the store. You show it to the service professional who comes to your home to perform a task. You use it to call the business to ask questions or look them up online. 

Print media can be used for a variety of tasks. But have you ever tried to show a digital ad to someone who isn’t in the room when you see it? Unless you grab a screenshot and send it immediately, it’s virtually impossible. 

Can you save a digital ad and use it later? Can you use the AI-generated ad to contact customer support or get answers to questions? It’s much more difficult due to the nature of the media. 

How AI tools are helping and hurting digital marketing

Businesses have and will continue to struggle with ways to use AI effectively without having it degrade the quality and effectiveness of their marketing efforts. AI is so far proving to be helpful and hurtful in various ways. Just a few of them:

Speeds up production

For repetitive tasks, artificial intelligence has helped improve efficiency. 

For example, you can write one email and then use AI-powered software to produce a dozen variations on that same email. From there, you can quickly develop a whole campaign faster than you might have written it all yourself. You can do similar things with social media ads.

Generates ideas

Suppose you want to come up with 20 ideas for blogs for the next four months, or email subjects, headlines, or campaign ideas. Rather than just do this yourself, AI is a powerful tool that can quickly generate a list of ideas. You might toss most of them out, but if you find a few good ones you wouldn’t have thought of, your marketing will be better for it.

Gets you started

You can also use artificial intelligence to create outlines for sales pages, blog articles, and other online marketing content. With an initial outline, you can more quickly get to a final draft and thus produce more content. It improves efficiency by cutting down on the planning stages.

Analyzes customer data

AI-powered analytics can synthesize your customer data and use it to suggest ideas for campaigns, follow-up, targeting, and various other marketing goals. Not only that, but it can do it much faster and more efficiently that humans could – even with all the other technology tools and platforms that exist for this purpose. AI excels at this particular task.

Those are some of the ways AI can aid your marketing efforts. 

Here are a couple of major risks:

Questionable quality of its ideas

AI doesn’t think. At least not yet. So all its ideas come from some sort of amalgamation of pre-existing ideas. That means what you’re getting from ChatGPT or other AI tools isn’t original, and might not even be effective. 

There’s little chance AI technology is even able to measure how well any of its suggestions might engage an audience or generate clicks and conversions, so its marketing suggestions aren’t likely to be better than what your team could come up with. Probably worse.

Erodes actual marketing skill

The more your company and we as a society rely on AI algorithms to create marketing and other content for us, the more we’ll forget how to do it ourselves. 

What does a campaign cost?

Get a custom-built sample campaign with real targeting data, ad creative, cost estimates, and distribution plans.

Use the Project Estimator

All the marketing knowledge and expertise we have today has come at a price. That price is best described as the slow, gradual accumulation of knowledge and skill that one could argue began around two hundred years ago.

The history of print marketing, which then broadened into direct response marketing, radio, television, improved graphic design, internet marketing, and all the systems, testing, data, and skills it has taken to create all this – wasn’t learned in a week. 

But all it will take is a few years of companies letting AI do all the heavy lifting, and we’ll be left with a bunch of marketing departments – including copywriters and graphic designers – who don’t know how to do their jobs as well as they used to – and with fewer places to turn to regain their skills.

This is a very serious risk, and it’s a major reason AI makes lots of people nervous and is probably not something your  should rely on too much for your marketing – including writing copy for direct mail.

Generating ideas is a skill. Outlining is a skill. Writing headlines and subject lines is a skill. Let the machines do it, and you’ll lose the skill and the creativity it makes possible. And it won’t take very long for it to be gone forever. 

The social politics of artificial intelligence in marketing

When it’s obvious to consumers that a particular piece of advertising has been generated by AI, they tend to think less highly of it, and of the company behind it. Sure, these attitudes may change over time. But right now, many more people think negatively about it than positively. This is true for images and text.

Why?

Probably because most people like real things over fake things. Real is trustworthy. But if the advertising itself was created by a machine, it makes the whole campaign and the business behind it seem a little less trustworthy.

Job losses

AI is already causing the loss of jobs as businesses begin automating tasks that used to be done by humans – even in high tech and other white collar businesses. People are nervous, and they see the threat artificial intelligence poses. It’s real. 

When you use print materials, the contrast between that and the fakery of AI marketing is only going to increase. Print campaigns will be seen not just as more trustworthy, but as supportive of real human workers doing real jobs. 

Dying industries

In the same way, AI is causing some entire industries to be threatened, such as film and TV production, computer coding, and other high-tech occupations. Whole industries are under threat because of AI. 

Your marketing team can use print materials to remind your potential customers that your industry, your products, and the workers behind them are alive, well, and very human.

Erosion of reality

As a society, we’re also beginning to lose grip on what’s real and true due to the rise of artificial intelligence. People can talk to AI bots as if they are real people, such as Grok and Siri. People can even converse with and date AI personalities – non-real entities that will engage with them as if they were real people. There are whole companies devoted to this.

Reality is fraying. 

Print marketing is the bastion of reality, holding the line for real, tangible goods and services delivered by honest hard workers. 

Print vs AI – why print outperforms AI generated marketing content

With all this in mind, you can see why print marketing will outperform AI marketing in the coming years. Digitally, it will get more and more difficult to avoid using AI in at least some of your production steps. And as mentioned earlier, there may be a couple benefits to it.

But breaking through all the barriers it creates, including AI content that right now still often features people with six fingers and three ears, will get more difficult as the technology reduces its mistakes. Here’s where print campaigns outshine digital channels – especially in the AI world.

More trusted

Direct mail and other forms of printed advertising build trust more than digital and AI marketing. This has been true for many years. But with AI and all its fakery and mistrust, the trust factor of print materials will only increase in the eyes of consumers. 

Based in reality

Print is tangible. You can pick it up, hold it, touch it, and interact with it. You can show it to people, set it aside, bring it with you to a store, tear off the coupons, and call the number or visit the website printed on it. Print advertising conveys the human touch more than anything digital can, because you can actually touch it.

More appreciated

People now feel more seen and valued when they receive print advertising than at any time in the past. Someone took the time to print and mail this. Compared to the instant arrival – and instant disappearance – of most online marketing, consumers feel more respected by print marketers because direct mail gives them time and freedom to engage with it at their convenience.

Neglecting print will put you behind competitors that are using it as part of their multi-channel marketing mix.

Still leverages the benefits of digital marketing 

Print marketers can also blend the two worlds of analog and digital. 

You can print QR codes, tiny URLs, coupon codes, customized offers, and directions to access dedicated landing pages all on your printed advertising campaigns. You can offer incentives to sign up for email marketing and SMS lists.

You can use print campaigns such as direct mail, brochures, and door hangers to draw consumers to your online marketing assets, which are easier to use for follow-up marketing.

But it’s print, so customers will trust it more and thus be more inclined to commit when they decide to engage with your message. With digital, they can forget as quickly as the ad disappears, seconds after it appeared on their screen. And, you can even utilize customer data and tactics like variable data printing to create personalized messages and surpass your business objectives. 

Direct mail enables you to utilize the benefits of high-tech tools like predictive analytics while still forging an emotional connection from marketing that feels personal and real. AI can’t match that.

Use front door media to overcome print marketing barriers

There are barriers to marketing effectively and engaging potential customers – even for print professionals and other forms of traditional marketing. Postcards, brochures, and direct mail get thrown away unopened and without being looked at. The Post Office doesn’t always deliver everything to every address, and you can’t always control the timing. Audience targeting can be challenging.

Plus, data tracking, analysis, and audience targeting can be challenging, depending on the specific form of print being used.

With front door marketing, also known as door hanger distribution, you can overcome all these barriers and more by getting your advertisements all alone – with no competing sources of attention – right on the front porch. And you can target customers down to exact streets where your most valuable prospects live, not just zip codes. You can even use your existing customer data, such as purchase history, paired with our distribution network. 

Door hangers are a game changer for print marketers. We get nearly 100% impressions and much greater response rates than direct mail. 

Our method of door to door marketing uses flyer distribution and ensures that only the customers who best align with your goals and targeted demographics and psychographics receive your valuable, printed, and durable door hangers. This greater efficiency allows you to scale faster and reach more customers who want to hear your message.

You can’t get any more real than the front porch – the last uninterrupted, undistracted place in your target audience’s daily experience.

Give our print tools and targeting capabilities a try

Create a door hanger marketing campaign from Power Direct as a standalone campaign or as a hybrid campaign with your digital efforts, and get a free custom ad targeting report with customized recommendations – just for requesting a project estimate!