Every marketer needs to be able to tell when campaigns are misfiring but for years the print industry has asked marketers to switch off their radars. The nature of the medium requires trust. Circulation figures, total readership claims and edition retention periods are all formidably hard to verify. There’s no click-through rate, no immediate response by which readers can respond to either a print ad or favourable editorial.

Worst of all, newspapers and magazines have exploited this lack of accountability to inflate circulation. Tricks employed to manipulate circulation include giving copies to airlines, gyms and hotels, handing out copies at trade fairs and offering whopping discounts and DVDs. How marketers are supposed to ascertain how these techniques affect the real metrics is beyond me.

Fortunately we are now we are in the digital age. Online messages can be analysed to the umpteenth degree. Every claim can be verified. And marketers are deciding they can no longer tolerate the vague claims of print media. The resulting exodus from offline to online is destroying print media

In fact, within two years we may be in a situation in which almost no print media survives. Hyperbole? Let me give you the evidence.

Regional newspapers across the country are closing down and slashing their workforces. The nationals are following the same trend. The Guardian is dependent on subsidies from its sister publication, AutoTrader. The Independent loses £10m every year and is shedding 23 per cent of its workforce this year, and Daily Mail & General Trust says advertising revenue is expected to fall 37 per cent at its newspaper division, with 1,000 staff getting the boot. The Telegraph and The Times are both engaging in radical cost cutting measures. Russian oligarch Alexander Lebedev bought the Evening Standard for a quid.

Optimists say the tabloids still turn a profit. The Sun, The Star and The Mirror are all in the black. Well maybe they are. But for how much longer? Press Gazette was the journalist’s bible and reported on the health of the newspaper industry, but it’s now gone bust. So what?

Let me suggest four conclusions from the death of print:

• Marketing with no verifiable RoI is now unacceptable. Newspaper advertising salesmen waffled about eyeballs. Now that this metric has been outed as unacceptably vague, we can apply the same ruthlessness to internet banner ads, billboards and sponsorship deals. Remember: marketers used “eyeball” methods because there was nothing better. Now there is.
• Creative strategies must change. Arresting images have been the staple of charity marketers for years. Barnardos’ newspaper ad of a baby with a cockroach coming out of the mouth was stunningly memorable. But with no offline media to host these images, photography-based campaigns will no longer be as useful. Social media, blogs, videos, virals and integrated will replace the static image.
• PR will be less useful. The centralised control of media by a handful of publications is being replaced by millions of smaller media such as blogs, online magazines and virals. Employing traditional PR agencies who pester journalists to pass on your message will be replaced by an increased emphasis on online marketing techniques, such as SEO and link exchanging.
• Marketers will raise their ambitions! When print dies, open the bubbly. Gone will be the eye-watering fees, the mystery of who saw the ad and the creative restrictiveness of print. Just see what Friends of the Earth achieved on a shoestring budget and a 5,000 person mailshot. That’s the future.

Charles Orton-Jones (www.charlesortonjones.com)