Print is dead? Someone should probably tell the local business with a queue out the door. Or the Etsy shop shipping out beautifully packaged orders every single day. Or the small business whose brand new business cards were the start of landing them their biggest client
yet.
Every few years, a fresh voice pops up somewhere - an overstuffed keynote, a rage baiting LinkedIn post, a trend report with a slide deck to sell , all declaring "print is dead."
Newspapers, direct mail, packaging, business cards: all supposedly buried, again, for the tenth time this decade, usually by someone with a product to pitch. Printed.com is done letting the claim go unchallenged.
Today the company launches "Print Is Here To Stay”, a tongue in cheek campaign with a simple job - to call out the people still declaring print dead and celebrate the ones who've spent years quietly proving them wrong.
Digital advertising has grown, and that's a good thing - Printed.com uses it every day, including to run this very campaign. But growth in one channel has never required the death of another. Print and digital aren't rivals - they're most powerful together. The UK print market remains a multi-billion pound industry, a claim backed by Printed.com's own double digit growth for three years running.
None of this fits the cancel culture style pile on some would rather you believed, so the claim gets repeated anyway. Nobody knows this better than Printed.com's own customers, who have never needed convincing. From resellers and designers who've built entire businesses around print, to SMEs who use it to look sharper, more credible and mor memorable than a website tab ever could, and everyday customers ordering business cards, flyers or signage because it simply gets the job done. None of them have been waiting for print to make a comeback - they know it never left. "Print Is Here To Stay" isn't just a rebuttal to the doom mongers; it's a celebration of the people who've been embracing print
all along.
"We're not launching this campaign because print needs saving, and that's the point," said Chris McShane, Marketing and Ecommerce Director, Printed.com. "Every year someone writes the same eulogy, and every year the people who actually live and breathe print roll their eyes and get on with it. Marketers keep confusing “less dominant than it was twenty years ago” with “dead”' and those are not the same thing. Print isn’t disappearing. It’s getting more targeted, more personal, and, for anyone who's looked at the data instead of the headlines, more effective than a lot of the channels that are supposedly replacing it. We just thought it was time someone said the quiet part out loud, on behalf of everyone who's been proving it every single day."
"Print Is Here To Stay" takes the loudest "print is dead" voices head on, with a healthy disregard for anyone peddling the myth for their own ends. But it's not just aimed at the naysayers - it's for the businesses caught in the middle; the ones who've been told print won't work for them and have quietly written it off without ever really trying it. This campaign is an invitation to take another look, and the confidence to back print as part of how they grow. Fittingly, the campaign itself runs largely through digital channels, proof that Printed.com isn't anti-digital, it's anti-nonsense, and that the two mediums are entirely capable of celebrating each other.
The campaign is now live across all main digital channels including Meta, Google and you can view the full hero film on YouTube here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbQ81jeDeRgwww.printed.com www.theprintedgroup.com