• by June 9, 2004

ALL THE PRINT THAT'S FIT FOR THIS STINT -- With 2004-05 upfront TV negotiations reaching their 7th inning stretch, national advertisers Thursday will turn their attention to a medium that normally gets overlooked during the frenetic TV sales season: print. But when the Association of National Advertisers convenes its second annual Print Advertising Forum in New York, don't expect the nation's leading marketers to start plunking down billions of dollars in magazine and newspaper buys for next year. If anything, print , whether it is national magazines with long lead times, or local newspapers, has become the poster child for "just-in-time-media-buying" and that's not about to change any time soon. Nonetheless, there's reason for publishers to have some cautious optimism for their near-term outlook. Given the rapid rise of TV advertising costs, magazines and newspapers are starting too look more like value propositions in many marketers' media mix. Couple that with an ample body of research indicating that magazine ad budgets are under-weighted and can contribute mightily to both brand awareness and product sales, and we may just be facing a new renaissance in print media planning.

And maybe it's just coincidental, but we couldn't help noticing that consumer magazine publishers saw their first ad page gain in ten months in May and the timing of that announcement from the Publishers Information Bureau couldn't be better as marketers begin refocusing on print. That's why the opening session of Thursday's meeting, "Print's Issues And Challenges - The Client Perspective," may be so important. The panel discussion, which features Ford media muscleman Mark Kaline, MediaVest print honcho Jack Triolo and publishers Jack Haire (Time Inc.) and Craig Moon (USA Today), will touch on print's role in the mix, how to actually measure print advertising ROI, some thorny audience measurement issues and perhaps most important of all, the many opportunities and threats confronting publishers.

But if you're looking for some real fireworks, it'll probably take place during a panel later that day when ad execs and publishers take on the perennial debate of audited circulation vs. magazine audience research. Given the panel's composition -GM's Linda Thomas Brooks and MediaCom's Tony Jarvis vs. Gruner + Jahr's Jack Bamberger and Audit Bureau of Circulations' Michael Lavery - it's probably a good thing that it's being moderated by a diplomat like Sequent Partners' Jim Spaeth.