Is print advertising dead?

With online marketing offering good rates, measurability and the opportunity to pay only for a “successful” ad with pay-per-click deals some people have predicted the death of print advertising. Interestingly Google, the dot.com of the moment disagrees. For some time Google has chosen to promote its services – in the UK at least – through print advertising. More recently Business Week has reported the struggle to get Google Publication Ads up and running…

You couldn’t make it up: Google is trialing the idea of buying a page of advertising in leading magazines and the selling the page in sections to small advertisers. As fractional ads cost more than the equivalent fraction of the page that they occupy, Google thinks it could undercut the magazines and still make a profit.

So clearly print isn’t dead. Even in the USA. Even Google believes it! And it also looks like the young founders of Google weren’t listening in college when someone mentioned the concept of “core business”.