The Value of Paper and Print (VoPP) tour hit Sydney this morning with its chief executive saying traditional print media is effective and deserves more of the advertiser’s budget. The message comes at an opportune time, the latest Roy Morgan research shows consumers prefer print, and as the head of one of the world’s biggest ad agencies urges agencies to spend on print. More than 100 people including printers, graphic art designers and advertisers attended the VoPP tour at the Rydges Sydney Central.
Speaking with Australian Printer, Kellie Northwood, VoPP head and executive director of Two Sides Australia, says attendance for the tour has been fantastic with capacity crowds in Melbourne, Adelaide, Sydney, and Brisbane, where the tour heads tomorrow from 8am to 9.30am, at Northshore Riverside Cafe, 297 MacArthur Avenue, Eagle Farm. Northwood says, “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. “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.” She 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. Northwood says, “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. “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.” She 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.
VoPP’s The Industry Report
“If we are taking an environmental perspective, then I think ink on paper is the most sustainable way to communicate,” Northwood 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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