Bring back Catalogues

I touched in the last post about the fact that marketeers are pretty much exclusively taught about digital marketing.

It is results season for META, GOOG and AMZN for Q1 2025 and I wanted to pick out some numbers to allow us to think about traditional marketing versus digital marketing.

To be clear I am agnostic about marketing channels, all I care about is building brand and getting a response. Brand building is a long term game and should be measured with awareness (prompted and unprompted), it is an investment just like a factory or a great team.

You can’t turn brand investment on and off, so it really needs to be a long term sustained activity. I will talk in another post about potential media to use for brand investment but thats for another day!

A quick AI search says that the average CPC (cost per click) for Google Ads has risen from $2.15 to $9.43 over the last 10 years. Facebook in the same time has gone from 50c to around $1.86. So reaching the same consumer 10 years later is approx 4 times more expensive assuming everything else stays the same.

If you follow the metrics through that would suggest that CPA would be 4 times what they were 10 years ago and it is unlikely your margin, pricing or volumes have grown at this rate. This leaves the marketeer battling against the rising costs and META and GOOG trying to inflate CPC to increase profits to invest in AI!

So all the time I speak to business owners I talk about more traditional channels (press, catalogues, TV) who have either been relatively steady in that same period or some have declined in cost because the future is digital!

Marketing isn’t digital or analogue, but the tools that have been build to launch digital campaigns are easier (and used to be more opaque) do the money goes into these channels first.

Boden is one of the brightest brands in direct marketing having thought about opening a store in London then focusing on investing in its direct business instead. The founder, Johnnie Boden often talks about the power of the catalogue and has suffered when they stopped it (article here)

Any audience but especially over 40 like to browse in stores, read catalogues, consider purchases and we shouldn’t forget this – I suggest most D2C brands consider print media as an option in there fight to deal with media inflation online!