Printers and their clients were reminded of the power of print as the Value of Paper and Print roadshow rolled into Sydney this morning.

The presentation by Two Sides Australia executive director Kellie Northwood walked the about 100-strong audience through evidence of why more money should be spent in print, and how printers can convince their clients to open their wallets.

The audience included all major paper merchants, top printers like Blue Star, Finsbury Green, IPMG, Hannanprint, Offset Alpine, Salmat, as well as clients like David Jones, Woolworths, Scenic Tours, Big W, Appliances Online, and various ad agencies.

Northwood showed series of Roy Morgan and Nielsen studies showing the effectiveness of print advertising and its effect on consumer behaviour.

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She also showed half a dozen examples of creative and successful print advertising techniques that had measurable impacts and illustrated the potential of the medium.

They included the now-famous Ikea catalogue ad, an edible book, coupons that degenerate when they expire, Nivea’s child locating armband, and direct mail infused with catnip. The examples were often multichannel campaigns and data-driven.

Northwood says not to just take it from her, citing Google’s heavy use of print advertising – 90 per cent of its new business acquisition attempts – and Steve Jobs’ ‘obsession’ with paper that led him to make the open of Apple packaging a user experience.

“The success is because the industry is behind it and they are bringing their clients, which is important. There is a lot of commentary around other media channels, and this is a voice for the more traditional media that people still know really works,” she says.

“But there is so much noise around digital media, it is almost like the marketers themselves are desperate to hear the good news around a media channel they know works and they use a lot.

“What we often do not hear is how successful the print media channels are, we hear about all this gross stats, all this social and digital banner ads, but catalogues had growth in volumes last year. And they most likely will increase this year too.”

[Related: Top add man says spend more in print]

Northwood says there is also a growing market in packaging and labelling. And if DM, brochures and leaflets were combined then the stats would show that sector to be growing as well.

“I have been listening for the past five to seven years that print is dying, print is extinct, print is over and seven years on print is still growing,” she says.

“I think we need to get off that ‘print is dead’ mentality, because it is not, the stats and the data are not saying that at all. Is it really effective and stable in a world where you have a lot of channels that are competing for the marketing budget.”

Northwood says that print is also more environmentally friendly than the digital media outputs, and the environmentalists are waking up to this and opting to use paper to communicate.

“If we are taking an environmental perspective, then I think ink on paper is the most sustainable way to communicate,” she says.

“Digital technologies have an enormous impact, we don’t have strong recycling, technology can’t keep up with hardware, so hardware is being turned over in two year cycles, and we have carbon foot print – so to fuel all of these devices we are plugging into carbon electricity sources.

“So if people from an environmental perspective want to communicate in a sustainable way then it will be on paper. With planted forestry, managed regulated and regenerated harvesting has far less of an impact than digital outputs,” she says.

“Most environmentalists are understanding that now and I think the industry itself is now in a strong push to plant forestry and harvest crops for paper that environmentalists are very supportive of than digital.”

VoPP says its industry report 2014 has been developed in the last two years with research, studies, collaborations, and networking with overseas and locally to push the message of print out.

“You see me here, but behind me there is a whole team of people, who have been pulling the work together. “This is the easy bit; the hard bit is the sort of the silent hard work that we have been doing to make sure our data is credible,” Northwood says.

“We have engaged with some major global research agencies such as MR, Ipsos, Roy Morgan, and independent studies from the UK with KMP economics, which has allowed us to put out the research that defends and speak very highly of the print media channels.

“Without those engagements we wouldn’t have the data that would allow us to push the focus more towards the traditional print media.”

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