Not long ago, I moved to a new house with an old garden shed slumped in the back corner of the yard. Spreading from a corner of the shed was a messy pile of surplus fence palings flat on the ground, taking up space I wanted for my lawn mower.

I set about picking them up and piling them outside as the first step in reclaiming the space. Right at the bottom of the pile, I came across what looked like a long grey stocking lumpy with snail shells. I thought it odd but not significant.

As I lifted the next and last paling, something gleaming black about the size of a cricket ball scuttle across the floor. It was dim, and I didn’t want to take my eyes off it and called my wife.

I was looking at a wild Funnel Web spider for the first time in my life. It was big. An easy 3-inches in length, and heavy, experts have told me since it was likely over ten years old, grown fat on centipedes living under that pile of palings until I came along. The stocking I had found earlier was its nest.

Highly venomous spiders are a reality in Australia. My mother equipped my childhood home with a fridge magnet from a local pest control company. The artwork included photos of and information about all the dangerous spiders common in our area, featured prominently was the deadly Funnel Web.

That magnet sat on our fridge for easily a decade. I must have looked at the photo of the Funnel Web a thousand times. When I saw that spider, inches from my feet in the dim light, I knew what it was, thanks in part to that magnet.

A flyer lasting years on a fridge is not a rare story for a printer. Print marketing has an exceptionally long tail, and it is not uncommon for flyers to bring home customers years after their distribution. Print can exist for years within a home or office.

The long and the short of it

Les Binet and Peter Field wrote the hugely influential industry report “The Long and the Short of It”. They analysed data from almost 1,000 winning entries into the Institute for Practitioners in Advertising (IPA) awards from 1980 to 2010. Comparing top-performing campaigns with lesser ones, looking for the drivers of success.

Marketing campaigns can be split into two categories. Short-term activation campaigns aimed at increasing sales immediately. And brand-building campaigns aimed at increasing brand awareness through increasing its share of voice.

In brief, they found that “although long-term effects always produce some short-term effects, the reverse is not true, and long-term effects are not simply an accumulation of short-term effects.” The brand building had a slower but cumulative effect on sales, while activation resulted in a sharper, shorter non-cumulative increase in sales.

They argue that advertising influences people in two ways.

Rational messaging

Activation campaigns rely on rational appeals to our intellect. Messages like ‘do it now get it cheaper’. Ideally, this is done close to the moment of purchase with a clear call to action. Rational offers will deliver an increase in sales. However, it tends to be a short-term increase because these kinds of messages are quickly forgotten, and the effects decay rapidly. There is little impact on brand perception and price elasticity, resulting in low long-term payback, and their effect tends to disappear within six months.

Activation campaigns create a saw-toothed sales graph with rapid increases followed by equally rapid decreases.

Emotional priming

Brand-building messages attach a feeling to a brand and create an emotional connection. They deliver modest short-term sales responses, but the effects are long-lasting because feelings are remembered longer than messages. Repeated exposures deepen the emotional effects and accumulate, leading to long-term sales growth and increased brand value perception. Their effect tends to last about two years.

Brand-building campaigns create a sales graph with a steadily increasing line. Binet and Field recommend that the best approach to marketing is to use both approaches together with a 60/40 split between long-term (60 per cent) and short-term (40 per cent) to benefit from both. Emotional priming campaigns should be supported with activation campaigns to ensure that short-term performance is not sacrificed. Mark Ritson advocates for this approach in what he calls Two Speed Marketing.

What does all this mean for print advertising?

Print marketing is capable of extended stays in households and offices. It also has two sides that are displayed separately. Thoughtful design can leverage these two facts and allow it to achieve both long-term and short-term results.

Binet and Field say that emotional priming requires multiple exposures. The long tail of print allows for multiple exposures of a person by a single printed piece.

Binet and Field also say that emotional priming campaigns are best supported by activation campaigns. The two sides of the paper sheet mean that two unique messages can be sent on the same piece.

Print marketing should include long-term emotional content on one side and short-term activation content on the other. You are essentially killing two birds with one stone.

Emotional content sounds difficult

The idea of creating a design that produces emotions sounds difficult, but it doesn’t have to be. There are a lot of emotions on offer, and some are relatively easy to trigger. Humour, surprise, knowledge, arousal, fear can all be triggered by an image, a punchline, or valuable information.

Knowledge is a very practical emotion to aim for. Every business is asked the same handful of questions every day. These FAQs are low-hanging fruit for creating content that is valuable to the end user and creates emotion.

To return to my pest control fridge magnet example, questions about dangerous spiders are undoubtedly an FAQ for those in the pest control industry. The images on that fridge magnet I grew up with were valuable to my mother and ultimately to me years later.

I used this approach on a job recently for a martial arts academy. The academy wanted a flyer promoting an upcoming open day for prospective students. We used one side of the flyer to promote the open day; on the reverse side, we put a class timetable and tips for first-time visitors.

The thinking is that people would use the flyer for the open day and keep it on the fridge to get them to their first class. All the while it is on the fridge, it is being helpful, creating the emotion of knowledge, and quietly building emotional capital and perceived value of the brand every time they look at it. It keeps the academy in the conversation and may bring in new students or help reactivate past students.

Paper and print have been a part of our culture for hundreds of years, and it has become deeply embedded. Every household has a place designated for the storage of printed paper and others for the display of it. Familiar places are in the hallway near the front door, on the kitchen bench, on a set of shelves next to a desk or on the side of the fridge. When print enters a space, it has a place to go and can spend a long time in a person’s possession. The length of the stay allows for multiple impressions on a person, satisfying the requirements for brand building.

Print also has two sides, allowing for two different messages to be sent on the same piece of paper. One side can be devoted to emotional priming, while the other is devoted to short-term activation. Satisfying the marketing best practice of supporting long-term campaigns with short-term campaigns.

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