How Custom Ads Can Rock the Printing World

Unicorn-Fortune-MagMagazine publishers can take advantage of new technology to offer precisely targeted ad space.

One of the promises of digital advertising was the ability to push highly relevant messages to specifically targeted audiences.

The idea sounded amazing: Digital search and display ads promised an inexpensive and fast way to reach massive amounts of readers with pinpoint accuracy using the latest in user tracking technology.

Print ad sales suffered in the process, as advertisers swarmed to what turned out to be the digital advertising unicorn.

The problem is that only a small fraction of the  massive amounts of ads served were actually viewed by human eyeballs. The market was awash in digital ad fraud and a vast majority of those digital ad dollars were wasted.

But the idea sounded great.

Fast forward to 2016, and we have the technology to serve up custom advertising in print magazines, notes this article in the AdBoom blog. The writer notes that a huge opportunity “lies in the ability to segment print readership and, potentially, to customize advertisements to specific audiences.

“2010 research by the CMO Council found that 63% of readers surveyed would go online for more information if the advertising in printed-subscription magazines were customized. Interest was even greater in customized content,” the article continues.

It’s now possible to create customized short-run publications that serve up tailored messages, ad spreads and features to particular segments. That technology can be leveraged to sell highly customized ad packages that offer the kind of targeting promised by digital, in a format that is 100% guaranteed to be viewable by human eyes.

That’s the kind of thinking that makes sense to advertisers.