Experts Blog

Google Advertising VP Says ‘Print is Dying’

By Kristi Hagen on Mar 28, 2013 - 11:00 AM

In a recent Adweek interview Google's Senior Vice President of Advertising, Susan Wojcicki, spoke of the demise of print advertisements. As users switch from purchasing magazines and newspapers to reading said publications on their tablets or laptops, the need for print diminishes at an astonishing rate.

Publishing a print ad in the New York Times for one day will cost you upwards of $800. This has size restrictions and audience circulation restrictions. Ads online can be as simple as a few words, or compelling pictures. The sky is the limit to how you want to interest users on your Web site and your wares. Wojcicki described the advertising trend that is moving print to digital:

"Advertising is very simple in a lot of ways. Advertisers go where the users go, and users are choosing to spend a lot more time online. Look at the adoption of tablets. Tablets have beautiful screens and can be interactive, so I think a lot of traditional print is being moved to being read on tablets. And I think we're moving to much more [Internet]-enabled TV. And think about radio, there are a lot of great services like Spotify, Pandora, iTunes and [Google] Play. So the users are moving really, really fast, and the advertisers need to catch up and move to where the users are."

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Wojcicki is running an empire with advertising profits soaring up to $43.7 billion dollars in 2012. One of her top concerns is ease of use for the customer (in line with Google's mantras and what should be all of our goals). Wojcicki says,

"Buying advertising right now is way too hard. In order to get more advertising [dollars to shift to digital], you need to make it be easier. People don't understand the logistics of advertising. To have the ads purchased and run, you need to have a series of products that work together."

Read more of Susan Wojcicki's interview at Adweek. Do you think print publications (and therefore print advertising) will survive in the digital age much longer?