The enduring debate of print versus online marketing has been upended by a Melbourne marketing professor, who says social media is ‘over-rated’ and print is still widely trusted.

Mark Ritson, professor of marketing at Melbourne Business School says marketers are rejecting traditional media ‘at their peril’, and points out 60 per cent of people still trust print advertisements.

The statistics come from shopper behaviour researcher Nielsen, which also reports only 46 per cent of consumers trust online and social media ads.

Ritson will argue in a series of lectures about the overrated social media marketing on platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, and is set to discuss the increasingly underrated formats TV and print.

The Nielsen data also found 56 per cent of people trust outdoor billboards and other out-of-home (OOH) media.

Print and TV advertising is said to be trusted most by the millennial generation, as the decreasing levels of interaction with traditional media enables the content to resonate more strongly.

Ritson says marketers tend to shift away from paid print advertising as online and social media content is free and convenient, and expense factors often eclipse the raw statistics.

“I have great sympathy for the print and TV world. I hear the same thing again and again, they meet a client who says ‘that’s all terrific but I don’t have a budget [for that] at the moment’,” says Ritson.

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