• by Richard Whitman , Columnist, May 10, 2017

If you didn't have a bit of history in this industry, a visit to the Valassis website might lead you to conclude the company is the leader in some form of personalized digital marketing. While that sort of might be true, it hardly captures the golden years of the company's direct mail and newspaper insert history. It's almost like someone said, “let's make the logo bigger and no one will know we're an old school print company looking to survive in the digital age.”

If you know that going in, then the findings of this latest study are not at all surprising. The company has just released the results of its study, Motivating the Dynamic Shopper: Purchase Decisions In-Progress. The study is said to focus on five key moments of the consumer purchase journey: thinking, wanting, watching, acting and shopping. The study took a look at how Millennials, GenX, Baby Boomers and parents make shopping decisions.

According to the study, nearly 55% of shoppers surveyed notice relevant digital ads but don’t click, respond or buy immediately. This is especially true for parents (66%); millennials (62%); and Gen X (60%). The study points to a couple of things that do motivate shoppers and they are:

- Coupons (39%) and discounts (32%) are the top two triggers influencing consumers to respond to a digital ad.

- Seeing a product ad in both print and online – 24% of consumers are more likely to respond when seeing an ad in both mediums, increasing to 50% for parents and 47% for millennials.

You see what they did there? Valassis, a company whose entire history is steeped in filling your Sunday newspaper with crap and your mailbox with envelopes full of coupons just -- shocker -- found that all that paper still contributes to action taken in today's digital world. Brilliant self-fulfilling prophecy, right?

There's even more of this goodness in the study's full blown eBook.