When to Drop Print Advertising from Your Marketing Strategy

During a recent internal meeting here at our agency, I posed the following question to the group, “Who has actually read a newspaper in the last 30 days? Not an online version, but an actual printed paper.” I wasn’t shocked to see that out of 35 marketing pros in the room, only three people raised their hands. That’s more than 90% of a very diverse team representing Millennials to the Silent Generation. We just don’t read the newspaper anymore. How about your target audience – is print still relevant to your players? Is picking up a paper and turning the pages the way your gamers want to read their news?

While it remains true that players of value skew to the older generation who have been newspaper consumers for decades but are they still turning to print as their primary source of information? It would be careless to make an assumption either way, without digging into the latest research about the media habits of your target audience, in-market and nation-wide.

We may think that we know our players, our market, our media outlets and their corresponding popularity. After all, that’s what we get paid for, right? But when it comes to allocating our media dollars, the more actionable insights we can absorb, the more effective and efficient our media plan will be, and the more effective and efficient we will be for our clients.

For up-to-the-minute national statistics, we turned to eMarketer, a firm that provides insights and trends related to digital marketing, media, and commerce. A recent report by eMarketer tells us that US Adults spend 25 minutes a day consuming print (14 minutes a day reading the newspaper and 11 minutes a day reading magazines). This is a sharp contrast to the nearly six hours per day that US Adults spend consuming information on their digital devices. Interesting.
To dial into the media habits of your target customers in your local area, one of the tools our own media planners use is Nielson Scarborough (NS). NS is especially helpful for gaming clients because of the comprehensive insight they provide relating to how casino-goers consume media in any one of 220 markets in the US. Statistics show that throughout these markets, print is definitely on the decline, but not dead yet.