What do you consider traditional advertising? Have you noticed a shift?

First, a little history lesson. The original staples of advertising were print, radio, and television. *The first newspaper ad was published in 1704 seeking a buyer for an Oyster Bay estate in the Boston News-Letter. Come 1922, the Queensboro Corporation buys the first commercials from AT&T’s radio station WEAF. Then, in 1941, NBC’s WNBT airs its first TV spot for a Bulova watch.

But, hold up. Let’s fast forward to now — the age of the internet! You can go to Starbucks for free Wi-Fi. People carry their laptops, iPads, and e-books to work, play, and read. We freak out if we forget our mobile devices at home. Oh, the terror!

Since the public birth of the World Wide Web in 1991, digital was poised to take advertising by storm. Blogging, web articles, and social media are critical formats to the success of any campaign now. Digital is everywhere. Digital advertising is the here and now. It’s not leaving anytime soon, thus making digital the traditional way to advertise now.

So, what does this mean? Did digital kill print advertising?

No! The goal for a successful brand is to differentiate from the competition. Now that digital advertising is the standard, we are forced to view and work with print in a whole new light — print advertising as the non-traditional method.

How can we leverage print in this digital world?
Leading up to the Presidental Elections, Twitter, a digitally-driven brand, began using out-of-home adverting as a new media. Jayanta Jenkins, Twitter’s global group creative director believes the OOH medium is “a really beautiful and powerful way to humanize tech brands… for us, [it] is a great way to get people to look up, off their devices, and remind them of the conversation that’s happening on Twitter. You can use less to say more.”

Twitter launched an out-of-home campaign featuring a series of social issue-themed outdoor ads

And Twitter isn’t the only tech brand that’s taking leaps into print. Airbnb.com, All Recipes, CNET.com, Net-a-Porter.com, and Dogster.com have included a non-traditional print medium to their strategies. This trend is not limited to digital companies, either. The TV industry is seeing the advantage of print with launches of Food Network and HGTV magazines.

Some advantages to print that these digitally-led companies see value in:

• Tangible connectivity. Countless times we can be found in the magazine aisle reading about the latest news or gossip, and dabbing an alluring perfume scent from the print ad page. Or going to an amazing concert to wait 30 minutes in the merch line to purchase a poster or shirt that your favorite band printed. Print gives a personality to the brand, from touch to sight to smell. That connection resonates with people. Think about millennials and Gen Z’s; they have grown up with digital and missing much of that tactile experience. I-5 Publishing had this in mind when they purchased Catster and Dogster, web-based pet aficionados that showcase viral cats and dogs. They use higher quality paper, binding, and photography which appeals to the buyer’s experience.
• Go offline. Omnipresence. (Pop-up) Buy this product! (Pop-up) Save lots of money! (Pop-up) Click now for details! The bombardment of digital ads can feel overwhelming. Connie Guglielmo, editor-in-chief of CNET news knows the importance of going offline, which helped push this tech website to make the transition into print. “People do like to decompress… shut off the screen and they like to read things in print.” Print allows you to look away, concentrate, and enjoy the experience, thus distancing itself from the distractions. With tech companies that have an imprint online already, print can heighten the omnipresence of online and offline.
• Ad Blockers. In 2016, nearly 70 million US internet users installed ad blockers on their computers and mobile devices. It’s projected that 2017 will grow another 24% to 86 million users with ad blockers. According to Kantar Millward Brown’s latest AdReaction Report, people install ad blockers because digital ads are viewed as interruptive, annoying, slowing down their device, and irrelevant. The luxury of print is that there’s nothing to block it — brand and content will be seen.
• Excitement. Wedding invitations. Birthday cards. Catalogs. Sure, you can receive all of these things digitally, but the exhilaration and joy you feel intensifies with a printed piece. Take for example the Ad Age 2016 Cannes Cover contest, for which Dieste’s Nicole Hamilton and Nicholas Ross created the winning design. “A Window Into the Creative Process – a 360 Experience” combined tactile print that folded into a VR viewer and kaleidoscope of digital illustrations and animations. The “design is joyous and engaging…for the first time in Ad Age, our cover is way more than a cover,” said Ad Age. It’s memorable. It’s a keepsake. It’s a great and lasting story.

We live in a digital world and we will continue to advance in digital advertising because it’s the new norm. But, step outside the box. Use a non-traditional method to promote your brands like Twitter did. Think print.

Your Editor Suggests: Consider them all. Use the best for each purpose. And thank Dieste

El Diario La Prensa is fighting for its life.

Like so many other print publications, the historic New York City-based tabloid published by impreMedia is struggling to find profits delivering Latino-related news in print.

The oldest Spanish-language daily newspaper in the United States (it’s been circulating since 1913) has been through several rounds of layoffs over the last years, but on December 30 a fatal prognosis was announced: the paper would only survive a year.

Since then-CEO of impreMedia Francisco Seghezzo delivered the news, the paper’s business side, its staff – both current and laid off – and its union have been racing to find a miracle cure, although not necessarily together.

“The workers feel a great sense of responsibility to continue the legacy of the paper,” said Susan DeCarava, NewsGuild union representative for El Diario, to Fox News Latino. “Right now we think it’s past time for management to understand and meet their obligation to the community that El Diario serves.”

El Diario, which had its peak in the 1980s, was taken over by US Hispanic Media Inc., a subsidiary of the Argentinian company La Nacion in 2012.

They have been in restructuring mode since then, cutting both the number of pages and the size of the staff.

In January, 36 staffers were slashed to 13, leaving only two reporters to cover the city of New York.

The Guild has devised a plan of its own to push the owners into investing more in the paper — or get them to step aside.

It began at City Hall in January, where they rallied council members to hold a hearing about ethnic media. Mayor Bill DeBlasio said the city could invest in all ethnic publications by putting ads for city services in these papers. They moved on to politicians in Albany in late March. At the Latino leadership conference known as Somos, where notable Latinos gather and politicians court the community, the Guild pushed the paper as a topic of conversation.

There, the Guild decided to launch an online petition asking El Diario’s parent company to save the paper. They also announced a plan to form an advisory panel to help advise the parent company on how to nurse El Diario back to health. Members of the panel will be announced later in the year, DeCarava said.

“The outgoing CEO said [on Dec. 30] that the paper would cease to exist in a year. Since then, they have not doubled down on that,” DeCarava said, adding, “but they also haven’t said what the plan is at all. I think they have been very circumspect in part because there has been such a strong reaction [to the news].”

Meanwhile, current CEO Gabriel Dantur told Fox News Latino by email that the death knell may have been premature. He says the company is trying to do more with less and be innovative. As an example, he said they are rethinking circulation by making the paper available in hospitals or schools that serve the community.

In his email, he wrote that the cuts were painful but necessary to reshape the publication — the company cut its losses from $12 million in 2012 to $2 million in 2015, according to what he told the New York Post in a January interview. They are hoping to break even this year.

“It is my goal to make sure that El Diario continues to be the voice of New York’s Hispanic Community for many years to come,” Dantur wrote in his email to FNL. “Toward that end, I ‘m working closely with the staff to ensure the vitality of both our print and online products. As a brand we need to stay relevant and available to our readers regardless of the format.”

As optimistic as that sounds, former staffers say that the cuts dealt morale a blow. Since the layoffs, three additional newsroom employees left the paper, including an award-winning reporter.

“It’s almost impossible to work with no photographers, no reporters,” said Manuel Avendano who worked at El Diario for 29 years in a variety of roles, most recently as a night editor. He was laid off at the end of January but he says he still values the paper and wants to help fight for its survival — whether he works there or not.

“It is very important for these times to have a digital edition but our community is not entirely digital. Our community is still reading the print edition,” Avendano said. “I think that in this crisis in print newspapers we still have a space in our community to keep alive print newspaper.”

While Dantur maintains that the new, reduced newsroom can maintain the paper’s journalistic standards, the Guild is filing for arbitration to contest the layoffs.

Other employees echo the need for bolstering the newsroom after the losses.

“We’re hoping they are able to start rehiring again,” said Oscar Hernández has worked on the sales department for 27 years. “The news side just needs more people to cover more of the news.”

The New York News Guild is waging an intense campaign to save the city’s top Spanish-language daily, El Diario, from a cost-cutting jobs-cutting owner.

The campaign ranges from public protests to filing National Labor Relations Board charges to enlisting political support and even, at one point, an offer of 20 percent pay cuts for all staffers in order to prevent a 50 percent job cut. El Diario’s owners flatly rejected that.

The union’s crusade is important not just because it would save newspaper jobs, but because it would prevent decimation of the leading voice and information source-including the print edition and the website-for the two-million-plus Hispanics and Hispanic-Americans in the Big Apple, as well as for the rest of the Hispanic-American community nationwide.

The latest fracas occurred over the last two months, when El Diario’s parent company, ImpreMedia-itself now a subsidiary of Argentina’s leading daily, La Nacion-arbitrarily announced it would lay off 13 El Diario newsroom staffers.

The paper’s newsroom staff was cut to 11, News Guild President Peter Szekely, a former and longtime national labor reporter for Reuters, told the New York City Council. The New York Post added only two of the 11 would be full-timers.

The real impact is on the quality of news the Spanish-speaking community receives, Szekely said.

“Where only a few years ago, the paper was filled with local stories the larger main-stream press wasn’t covering, today it is just a shadow of its former self,” he testified. “The paper that calls itself ‘The Champion of the Hispanics’ is today filled with stories aggregated from wire services and other people’s reporting. The same goes for the El Diario website.

“Last summer, one of our members who left El Diario“-before the latest cuts-“told us: ‘I did not become a reporter to cut and paste from other websites.'”

El Diario’s owners say the latest layoffs, on top of buyouts two years ago, and the firing of eight other Guild members in 2014, were needed to stem the paper’s losses. They claim the losses were down to $2 million in 2015, from $12 million yearly when they took over, and they expect to break even this year. The National Labor Relations Board later ruled the 2014 firings broke labor law.

Szekely rebutted the cut-losses-by-firings argument by saying that studies show many newspapers have made that mistake and that “it isn’t just bad public policy, it’s bad business.” Other studies, including an analysis at a recent News Guild convention, show readers are willing to pay a premium price for a quality newspaper or newspaper website.

Szekely admitted the La Nacion-owned papers in the U.S., including El Diario, “are private enterprises that need to turn a profit.

“But while it’s not written into their charters, they also assume the position of public trusts,” he said. “The foreign language press is a pipeline to the city’s immigrant communities. They bring to readers news that often can’t be found elsewhere…in the language they are most comfortable with.

“Since an informed citizenry is essential to a free society, the press provides a public service,” Szekely explained. “It is therefore morally incumbent on the owners of these vital enterprises to continue to do all that they can to continue to inform their readers and it is equally incumbent upon government to do all it can to support these enterprises.”

The city council took no action on that implied News Guild request, but several council members joined Szekely in a pro-El Diario press conference on the City Hall steps after the council hearing.