Opening Remarks to the 2013 Carnegie Conference

Carnegie Higher Ed Feb 04, 2013 Carnegie Higher Ed Persona The Visionary Frontrunner

Good morning and welcome to the 2013 Carnegie Conference.  Let me begin by saying…print is dead.

Just checking to make sure my staff is awake.  By the looks on their faces I believe they are.

If that statement were true we wouldn’t be here right now because there would be no Carnegie Communications and, thus, no Carnegie Conference.

Print is not dead. In fact, it’s seeing record years. That’s because print is evolving, working in tandem with the vast technological resources now available to us. As it should.

No, print is not dead, even though “we’ve become so dependent on being connected to the Internet all the time that 43% of U.S. adults would be willing to give up beer for a month if it meant they could keep accessing the Internet on their smartphones.” I don’t believe that statistic includes many of my friends. Additionally, “36% said they’d be willing to give up chocolate.” That definitely does not include my wife.

These statistics are from a recent blog post by the Director of Engineering for Google Analytics. I am inclined to trust their findings, but even based purely on personal experience and anecdotes, there’s no denying the draw of the Internet. So what about print?

According to the Association of Magazine Media’s 2012-2013 Factbook (and its contributing researchers):

  • Magazine readership has grown over the past five years.
  • Almost all adults—96%—under the age of 25 read magazines.
  • Four out of five adults in the United States read magazines; that’s about 188 million people.
  • Shoppers are most heavily influenced by print advertisements, compared to all other media.
  • Magazine readers spend 41 minutes on average on each printed issue. That’s especially impressive when you think about the five minutes spent on average on any given website.
  • Among magazine readers aged 18–34, almost 75% have followed a magazine on Twitter. Almost 70% of that population has posted a magazine article and over 60% has shared magazine content with friends on Facebook. And about 75% of those readers have followed a print publication or re-pinned a print publication’s content on Pinterest.
  • Since Facebook was founded in 2004, magazines have gained more than a million young adult readers.

And, last but not least, magazines rank #1 at influencing consumers to start a search online, according to a 2010 BIGresearch Simultaneous Media Usage Study.

“Today, there is an imaginary competition between traditional and digital medias. Instead, what we do know is that each drives the other, and recent research consistently shows that there is not only room for print media, there is a need for it.”

Effectively integrating traditional and digital media is our topic for the next two days. We chose this theme because we at Carnegie are firm believers in the power of combining these two seemingly disparate forms of communication. We live it every day, and we’ve proven its effectiveness with our own services.

Over the past four years, the number of students engaged with our magazine service has grown 109%. How? Integrating effective e-mail follow up, an abundance of SEO, intelligent PPC, and Retargeting.

One year ago 6.2% of traffic to our student portal, CollegeXpress, was organic. By the end of 2012, it was 43.7%. We credit that growth to SEO and its help in delivering ample new features and content to the appropriate audience.

The knowledge we’ve gained from our foray into the digital world brought the changes that resulted in our “magazines” becoming much more than the pages they are printed on. They are a comprehensive, innovative, and turnkey marketing solution.

Delivered by Joe Moore, January 24 at the 2013 Carnegie Conference. Please join us January 30-31, 2014 for next year’s conference.

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