Print Advertising Pairs With Digital

A new survey entitled the 2010 Domain Industry Report, commissioned by the British Government and undertaken by domain name and webhosting authority Nominet, has found that more than 65 percent of print, television and radio advertisements now include a web address.

Samples for the survey were taken from a variety of advertising mediums, with print scoring highest for percentage of “digital penetration”, which Nominet rates according to the presence of URLs or other web-based resources in a given campaign. Findings indicated that more than 80 percent of print media advertisements included a web address, while just over half of UK television ads also used online resources.

Nominet director Phil Kingsland suggested in a press release accompanying the survey findings that “the use of websites in advertising is becoming increasingly prevalent, a trend we expect to continue.” Year on year results of the annual survey have shown a steady increase in advertising integration between newer digital mediums and older mass media counterparts like radio and television. Disparities existing across the different media types, however, were proportionately decreasing, and one could reasonably conclude that this effect will continue until a kind of inter-disciplinary saturation has been achieved.

The Nominet report concludes that integration between offline and online forms of advertising and publicity will only increase in the future, and that companies who fail to offer their customers both digital and print/mass media points of communication risk being left behind. While the survey also noted differences in approach, making distinctions between British businesses which opt for .com and .co.uk domains, trends in the business appear more or less constant.

With the proliferation of domain hosting services and broadband internet access throughout the United Kingdom, the ability to integrate different forms of advertising media will only become easier and more accessible to British businesses both large and small.