Wolff: Time for an upswing in print advertising

• Digital advertising growth is showing signs of stalling
• Print%2C with higher credibility%2C offers an attractive alternative
• The print audience has money and is willing to spend it

I blinked and may have missed my chance to weigh in on a digital media trend. It's called "native advertising" — a nitwit solution to an insoluble problem, which seems to be passing as fast as most other strokes of digital marketing genius.

But this gives me a chance to segue from a fading trend to an unexpected one: some rather positive news for print.

Native advertising, if you were also blinking during its short vogue, is a paid-for message that's designed to look like legitimate editorial matter — and to supplant no-question-this-is-an-ad advertising, which, in digital media, doesn't work very well and which advertisers insist on paying less and less for. (Native advertising's sister bit of fakery is called "branded content.")

In the print world, advertising that mimics content is called "advertorial" and has always been a low-rent form tolerated because it didn't fool anybody. In the digital world, which already lacks clear provenance, it not only fools lots of people, but, with some fine tuning, gets indexed (unlike actual advertising) by search engines, giving it some permanent authority.

But then, reductio ad absurdum, The Atlantic magazine got caught a few weeks ago hosting native advertising masking as legit copy, extolling Scientology.

This practice, widely embraced by all variety of desperate content sites, was suddenly exposed and buried under mountains of ridicule.

The mini-scandal highlighted not just how hard it is to sell digital ads but how far heretofore dignified and professional people will go in prostrating themselves in front of any lame rationale to make a sale.

Amidst the controversy, digital marketer Alan McGlade rushed to defend native advertising on Forbes.com — a site infamous for its shameless contortions to ring an extra buck out of the difficult digital landscape — saying how millennials love "the seamless blend of content and merchandising fueled by context" and nattering on about the virtues of "curated content that is highly relevant to the user, woven together with products that are integral to the subject being discussed."

In other words, every time these people open their mouths, the credibility of the digital media business dies a little more.

It's in part this loss of credibility, and the ever-diminishing prestige of digital content, that's resulted in the advertising world's perception that digital media is worth so much less than the traditional stuff.

Yet, at the same time, the overwhelming consensus, the absolute certainty among sentient media professionals, is that print is dead. Gone. For years, the entire print industry denied its own vulnerability, then one day woke up and said, oh ... it's true. Damn, we're cooked.

Almost every print organization is adopting a strategy called "digital first" — trying to move as fast as possible away from the business they're in.

But Ken Doctor, author of the book Newsonomics, who has become the de facto pathologist of the newspaper business, has recently noted a striking countertrend in favor of print: Older readers of newspapers (that is, the people who actually read newspapers) have little price sensitivity. This is true for digital subscriptions and conventional ones.

True, higher prices discourage younger readers — but they don't read newspapers, anyway. Older readers, on the other hand, seem willing to pay anything to hold on to what they're used to. A paying audience (old codgers or not) is no small thing.

What's more, there are signs of an improving market. Print's value has fallen so low that there are suddenly ready buyers. The Tribune Co. (the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune) itself is all the talk among aggressive media entrepreneurs.

There is, as always, Rupert Murdoch, CEO of News Corp. Murdoch is shortly to separate his newspaper business from his Fox entertainment assets, which will create a notable market phenomenon.

With the split, the shares in his entertainment company will rise, meaning that those shareholders — including his family, which controls both businesses — who will receive shares in the new company, will get the $3 billion to $5 billion newspaper business for free.

It's just cream on top, meaning Murdoch will have hardly any restraints on doing what he most wants to do: buy more papers. So the market lifts.

Now, there is Scientology.

Advertisers never left television for the Internet.

But they did leave print for the Internet — both because print content was plentiful and free online, driving ad costs down, and in the ever-constant pursuit of the young, who were abandoning newspapers and magazines.

But it has been, for traditional brands and classic message advertising, a terrible mismatch, nicely symbolized by how The Atlantic let itself be hijacked by the Scientologists.

A critical aspect of advertising method is to be able to piggyback on a publisher's bona fides.

But what advertisers find themselves buying now in the digital realm is a suspect world without pedigree or context.

Here's the other trend: They're buying less, not more of it. Digital advertising growth is showing clear signs of stalling out.

Advertisers still need a place where their message can be reliably framed, and publishers still need advertisers who deal in legit advertising. Each depends on the other's credibility.

It's a moment for some smart people in print, if there are any, to make the case that the pendulum could actually be swinging back — and that maybe it's not too late.

Michael Wolff can be reached at michael@burnrate.com, and on Twitter @MichaelWolffNYC.