Print is not broken. Advertising is broken.

The reason CMOs are all stressed when the CFO asks for ROI is that 50% of advertising doesn't work. If they can't figure out which 50% the smart thing is to do something else that does. Direct response may be pretty expensive, but at least you know if it works or not.

The thing about viral marketing and public relations is that when it's done well, even if it doesn't always work, the cost is negligible compared to space ads. If Print can demonstrate how much it can help with viral marketing and public relations the CMO's will be glad to pay for it.

That's the point of Clickable Print that connects Print to TV. Printernet Publishing can mean 50,000,000 postcards or handout cards in people's hands overnight. If you don't have the speed and scale, it's non valuable to viral marketing. If you do have the speed and scale, it becomes invaluable to viral marketing.

The End of Brand Advertising --
Seeking Alpha:
December 28, 2008
"The internet has witnessed the conversion of analog advertising dollars into digital advertising pennies (credit due to Jeff Zucker at NBC (GE) for “coining” that metaphor). Despite the fact that a viewer is always just a “click away” on the internet, online advertisements command only a fraction of the cost of far less measurable media – like print, radio, and television. Consider this: an advertisement on MySpace (NWS) might cost $.25 to show to 1,000 people ($.25 CPM), versus $25 for 1,000 readers of Time (TWX) magazine ($25 CPM).
. . .
In the good old days of performance-less advertising, engagement didn’t really matter because you generally couldn’t quantify it. Studies on Reach, Frequency, and Recall aside, General Motors (GM) had no way of measuring the marginal benefit (much less revenue!) of a particular advertisement. But on the internet, it is quite clear that if nobody is clicking on your ad, then nobody is noticing it, much less “connecting” with it. Proctor and Gamble has likely spent millions of dollars on Facebook advertisements that attract a few dozen active “followers” – probably the same hit rate they had in Time magazine 20 years ago, but with one key difference: Now anyone can prove that people don’t engage with the advertisement!
. . .
Pundits will argue that with increased ad targeting, profiling, and all sorts of other algorithmic alchemy, online ad revenues will be boosted. In my opinion, such talk is nonsense insofar as brand advertising (not direct response) is concerned. Rather, a seismic shift is underway – one that will not only change the nature of advertising, but will also show that the last century of offline advertising witnessed a tremendous amount of money being flushed down the toilet. We are a lot smarter than we were 50 years ago, and those analog dollars really should have been analog pennies all along.