• by October 2, 2008

Eulogizing old media is a favorite pastime for pundits nowadays. Not so fast. Sure, things may look bleak. Newspaper advertising seems to have hit its long-anticipated tipping point and is in record declines. The network upfronts held their own this year, but only because advertisers bought more spots to offset declining audiences, so networks sold more inventory. Magazine advertising is taking an extra hit this year because of the slow economy.
All of this as new-media advertising explodes. Online advertising is projected to double in five years, with growth eight times that of advertising in general. By 2012, Internet ad spending will be second only to direct marketing. Social networking sites and mobile devices are getting more and more attention as the new hot spots.

These trends have led many to proclaim the imminent demise of traditional media. Netscape and Ning entrepreneur Marc Andreessen told the moguls at this year's Allen & Company media conference in Sun Valley, "If you have old media, you should sell," The New York Times reported. He's not alone. Philip Meyer, a Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper reporter turned thought-leading academic (and my doctoral advisor), published The Vanishing Newspaper in 2004, in which he extrapolated current trends to the vanishing point, predicting - only somewhat tongue-in-cheek - that the last daily newspaper in America will be published in 2043, just 35 years from now. Sell, indeed.
Or maybe not.

Advertising actually works better in traditional media, and new research supports that. Certainly, consumers are adopting new media hand over fist. But they like advertising better when it comes with a traditional flair.

Yankelovich Inc. and Sequent Partners LLC, with input from the Center for Media Design at Ball State University, just completed a major study of 4,000-plus ad exposures across 16 media platforms called "When Advertising Works." WAW measured and modeled 23 categories of situational characteristics covering all factors bearing on the moment when consumers were exposed to each ad. The primary purpose was to develop advertising models, norms and best practices for each of the 16 media. But the analysis also revealed something about new versus traditional media.

Ad ratings for the seven traditional media studied were far superior to those of the nine digital media studied. On average, 56 percent rated traditional media ads as having made a positive impression on them; just 31 percent said so about digital ads. By substantial margins, traditional media ads were more likely to motivate consumers to buy the product in a store or to talk about the ad or the product. On every measure of enjoyment, relevance and satisfaction, even ad annoyance, traditional media were rated much more positively.

Maybe this just reflects growing pains. But these are big challenges, and generally unrecognized ones. Traditional media came of age hand in hand with advertising. Not so with new media. Search preceded search ads. E-mail preceded e-mail campaigns. Cell phones preceded mobile marketing. In fact, WAW showed that new media are used for problem-solving much more than traditional media, meaning that consumers are engaged with new media in a state of mind less receptive to interruptions, distractions or advertising diversions.

The digital experience can be very personal. It's self-customized, self-directed and self-expressive. Not necessarily a place where advertising is welcome. The phrase itself - digital media - may not even reflect how consumers think. Consumers understand and accept that the Internet and cell phones are digital but perhaps not that they are media, and thus open to advertising. So digital ad approaches will have to master a media situation very different from that of traditional media. WAW results show lots of room for improvement.

With more experience, and more research into situational factors, digital media will get better. But this will not change the fact that traditional media have an inherent strength when it comes to advertising. Whether that advantage will persist remains to be seen, but it certainly means it's way too soon to give up on old media.

J. Walker Smith is president of Yankelovich Inc., a marketing consultancy specializing in consumer lifestyle trends and marketing productivity solutions, and is the coauthor of four bestsellers, including Generation Ageless: How Baby Boomers Are Changing the Way We Live Today ... And They're Just Getting Started.