Print in the Mix Conference 2009

I attended the Print in the Mix conference today (thanks CMA folks, again!) at the Hilton Hotel to listen to speakers from various industries comment on the state of print. What is happening in the print industry these days? I’ve been so caught up in digital media recently, I figured I’d better stop by and check.

I enjoyed hearing from Jennifer Davey, Account Manager from Bassett Direct discuss the Ford and Air Miles direct mail campaigns. Air Miles especially is a fun case study. Their 1to1 campaign is just so pretty and I feel they’ve integrated their web elements in a relevant and user-friendly way.

Hugh Dow from Mediabrands gave a presentation on media buying that had some very interesting statistics. Apparently the online readership for newspapers is really small – the vast majority of people still read an actual newspaper. Colour me shocked! The only market that has done well in recent years is specialty and niche publications as well as the freebies like Metro. Apparently the readership of Now Magazine is up 15%! Good on them. According to Hugh, the two next big things on the horizon will be the e-readers and mobility marketing. That makes sense to me: I want an Kindle and an iPhone so much I’d kill your mother for them. Not my mother, but yours, sure.

The last speaker of the day was Jeff Stewart from Trekk Cross-Media discussing social media strategies as they relate to print. It was the end of the day, so maybe I missed something, but I didn’t come away with a solution on how to integrate the two. Don’t get me wrong, Jeff was a fascinating and enthusiastic speaker. My favourite line of the evening was Jeff saying, “In another few years, it won’t be called social media anymore; it’ll just be media”. He discussed a whole bunch of upcoming social media trends like Google Wave, semantic web search, collecta, etc., which was neat. But what about print? How does it stay relevant?

So, final consensus? I’ve attended several digital forum conferences and seminars in the past few months and they were buzzing with new ideas, new innovations, new platforms…new, new, new! I hate to say it, because my background is in print and I’ve always loved the medium, but I came out of this conference feeling that the answer to the question what’s new in print is “Er…nothing. But print’s not dead! We swear!” The overall emphasis was that 2009 was awful and 2010 will be marginally better – recouping some ground, but only a fraction of what will be lost this year. Print is a viable medium and still has access to a large portion of the Canadian populace, but it needs to evolve with digital and integrate new trends in order to flourish. It’s disheartening and I hope the stakeholders holding the wallets figure it out.

An irrelevant note: this event was at the Hilton hotel. The food was very good overall, but their catering department can sure deliver up an utterly fabulous butter cookie. Like, the kind I’m going to be thinking about the rest of my life. Just sayin’.