What Print Advertising Is Actually For Now
India is one of the few large markets where a serious argument for newspapers can still be made without embarrassment, and where circulation held while much of the world’s collapsed.
Print advertising survived, but not doing the job it used to do, and the brands still spending well in it are buying something fairly specific.
What print advertising buys today
Seriousness, and a particular kind of public record. A full page announcing a result, an apology, a leadership change or a category entry reaches a modest number of readers and an outsized number of the people who matter to that announcement.
It is closer to a filing than to a campaign, and it is priced and judged accordingly by the companies that use it best.
Some of that weight is borrowed from the paper rather than earned by the brand. An announcement carried in a masthead people trust inherits a little of that trust, which is exactly what a company in trouble is paying for and exactly why the format resists being replaced by a post.
Where it still reaches genuinely
Regional language dailies, which remain the most trusted medium in large parts of the country and have an older, wealthier and more decisive readership than almost anything digital delivers in the same geography.
A national English buy and a Tamil or Marathi daily buy are two entirely different products that happen to share a format.
What it stopped being able to do
Build a brand from nothing with a young audience. That audience is not there, and no amount of creative quality in a broadsheet will find it.
The waste in print is almost always a brand using it for reach it no longer delivers, rather than a brand using it for weight it still does.