This tickled our funny bone, from our friend Samir “Mr. Magazine” Husni as quoted in Print Power:
“Online or mobile magazines are not real. It’s only real if you can touch it, feel it, throw it across the room. I tell my students: until you are happy with a virtual boyfriend or girlfriend, virtual reality will never compete.”
“For Husni, there’s no substitute for print when it comes to connecting with consumers, and he argues that advertising is more favourably regarded and accepted as ‘part of the experience’ than in any other media,” writes Shareena Patel. “Furthermore, he believes passionately that doom-mongering pundits only have to look at history to see that reports of print’s death are, as Mark Twain might have put it, highly exaggerated.”
We’ve been saying the same thing for years, and Mr. Magazine was a leading voice for the continued power of print back then too.
Fast forward to 2015, and the strong but lonely voices advocating for print have become a chorus. Brands are reinventing themselves as media publishers, digital companies are breaking out into print, and marketers are calling print “their secret weapon.”
Why?
“Advertising has yet to find a better environment in which to engage with consumers than in the pages of a print magazine,” claims Husni, who explains that print ads are considered part of the experience by readers. Digital ads, on the other hand, are interruptive and unwelcome.
“Have you ever heard anybody say, ‘The minute I get my favourite magazine, I tear off all the ad pages’? Yet if I watch television I watch it on delay, so I can fast forward through the ads!” Husni tells Patel.
“That’s not the case with magazines – advertising is part of the real estate. Some people even read the adverts first. And as for ads on other platforms… My mobile phone, tablet or internet? Stop bothering me! Stop popping in my face!”
A staunch supporter of print, Husni is also pragmatic enough to understand that the medium must change to fit the new business models. But never for a moment imagine that a magazine can live in digital.
“Nobody comes to my house and says ‘Oh, can I look at your iPad so I can read your copy of GQ?’ But they pick up GQ without even asking me, because it’s on my coffee table, it looks beautiful, it’s something that draws you in,” Husni asserts.