By Aaron Sammut, Art Director
As a print designer who absolutely loves/respects the printed medium, it was difficult attending the recent Publish conference in Sydney and constantly hear the amount of buzz still happening around developments in the digital world.
Buzz term that ranked amongst the most uttered was “Native Content”. Native Content is an exciting concept, but to me it’s a new term to make the idea of advertorial slightly easier to accept. The benefit of Native Content is that publishers are now pitching promotional ideas to clients that they know will fit in with their audiences and the brands. Very exciting and it makes sense – who knows the audience more than the magazine themselves? However, Native Content should be a highly considered offer, as a poor quality and badly performing campaign will hurt both brands. Anyway, it might be a term that we will start to hear more of in the near future, or maybe it will disappear faster than it has arrived, but one of the benefits is that it gets around the second most spoken about terms, the dreaded “Ad Blocker”. If somebody turns on Ad Blockers there is every chance that they weren’t part of your market anyway, so, no problem, no big loss there.
The next term I heard in its various forms was “give them what they want” – if you track analytics then each piece of content should be a learning exercise. We can learn how to best distribute content, what time readers are consuming different forms of content. It’s obvious that mobile users consume content in a completely different manner to print readers but strangely the argument didn’t have anything to do with short vs long form for editorials and videos. Quality is the factor that matters. A reader on any platform will read 2000 words if they’re engaged.
This makes sense, we should be learning from our readers, but, and this is a big but, I feel that giving your readers what they want rather than what they need is a balance that needs to be respected. I have a three year old son and as much as I would like to give him what he wants, at some point he needs to be educated and to me publishing and magazines have always been an educational tool, like a (cool) text book. In a few years readers could have dictated a shift in quality – where it is less world events and more cats playing a piano. Where on the same day a feature on what is inside the Kardashian pantry could track significantly higher than a political leader change – actually this one is real and was one of the scariest things I heard all day at Publish. A few years ago it was print is dead, in a few years we might be saying that “digital is brain dead”.
Other buzz terms included “programmatic”, “cross platform”, “disrupters” and “Outbrain” and are all worthy of some research.
What I needed to hear at Publish was thanks to the very energetic and inspiring Lisa Messenger at The Collective – amongst a number of great quotes Lisa said, “I love print. I adore print.”
Me too.
To me print is not dead. Far from it. We just have to do things better. We have to simplify the business. We should leverage off digital and not rely on it.
Sadly, Publish was 80% digital, but as an old(ish) print designer I can understand as the medium is still in its infancy. What I learnt from Lisa Messenger is that quality, energy and a belief in print can take you all the way.
Developing a product that you start to doubt makes it difficult to promote and sell. I believe in print and I believe in the magazines that APRS Media produce. But, I also believe we can do it better. We can always do better.