Today, marketers routinely post their brochures as PDF files on their websites, to entice visitors to download information and perhaps fill out a form to do so. There often is no plan to print the collateral at all, except for occasional on-demand printing in low quantities for trade shows and sales calls.
And with the economy still floundering, email, pay-per-click and other online media seem a lot more attractive than printed direct mail. Webinars instead of seminars. Twitters instead of newsletters.
Suddenly everything is free.
As a result, the value of traditional marketing services has been plunging across the board. Remember when you had to pay hundreds for typesetting, before type became free thanks to computers? Now the same trend is happening everywhere. Why pay thousands to have a brochure designed, if you're not going to spend thousands more printing it? Why pay for custom photo shoots that eat up half your budget for the year? Ink and paper are disappearing from marketing, or at least becoming far less important. It's the same phenomenon that's happening to newspapers and magazines. And to CDs and probably books before long.
The local Blockbuster video store in my town just closed up shop. A few weeks earlier, the FYE store down the street went under. Design firms that built their business on deep expertise in ink and printing are struggling or disappearing.
Marshall McLuhan famously said, "The medium is the message." Not anymore. The medium is disappearing. Now the message is the message.
In a virtual world, content isn't just king. It's the only thing.
Learn more about my writing and editing services at www.westcopy.com.
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