A print ad: heresy or stroke of genius.

Let's not beat around the bush. Buying an ad in a print magazine: heresy or stroke of genius? The answer sits in one question the salesperson will never ask you.

You, a magazine, a purchase: never

Answer honestly. The last time you opened a free magazine, saw an ad, and decided to go buy from that shop: when was it? Never. Me neither. And you're expecting your customers to do it?

Same reasoning for the Yellow Pages. Have you opened them once this year? No. Nobody has. A medium nobody consults doesn't become effective because a salesperson is convincing.

And I might as well own it right away: I'm preaching for my own parish. I build websites, so when I tell you to put that money elsewhere, I have an interest in it. Judge the argument, not the person making it. Here it is.

You don't fit the windows before the foundations

Imagine it works. The ad is good, it catches the eye, someone gets interested and looks up your business. They land on a site that doesn't work: slow, unreadable on a phone, nothing telling them what to do. You just paid to send people into a sieve.

You don't fit a house's windows before you've poured the foundations. Marketing is the same: there's an order. You shore up the base first, the place where you welcome people, before buying attention to send them there.

Take the example I give all the time. Someone posts videos on Instagram or TikTok, and I hope this happens to you: a million views. Say ten thousand people, intrigued, go look at your profile and search for your site. Ten thousand warm, interested people. Where do they land? Nowhere. You captured a whole audience's attention and you do nothing with it, for lack of a place to welcome it. Attention with no destination turns into nothing.

Marketing is arbitrating

This is where we get to the real subject. Marketing isn't stacking actions. It's choosing. You can't do everything at once: post videos, buy ads, write articles, run campaigns. You have to make the call. What is, today, the action that brings you the most, and where do you start?

That's exactly a business owner's job. He doesn't buy himself a coffee machine to please the team when the priority is the machine that produces. He arbitrates, constantly, between what's pleasant and what's useful. That's what a marketing vision is: steering, not executing at random.

Because executing, everyone knows how to do. Anyone can boost a post, run an ad, get a site built. What's rare isn't the action, it's the judgment: knowing which one moves you forward, and in what order. A good strategy in the wrong place in time is money down the drain.

So, print?

Back to the ad. Am I telling you never to buy one? No. It's one lever among others, and it has its moment. If you're a big outfit, with solid foundations already in place and budget to spread around, go ahead: print keeps its uses, for awareness, for anchoring a brand that's already established.

But if you're a local business whose site is a sieve, the question isn't "does print work". It's "is this my priority, right now". And the answer is almost always no.

It's not selling a comb to a bald man: the ad isn't useless in itself. It's a question of timing. There's an order, and print comes after the base, not before. The magazine's salesperson will never tell you that, and that's normal: he's selling his product, like you sell yours. It isn't dishonest, it's his job. It's on you to know where you stand.

Shore up the house first. The windows, the decor, the ads will come when there are walls to hold them.