If you are involved in the print industry, representing a newspaper or magazine, you have read these types of articles before - the digital age is upon us. Ink is doomed. Whether or not you believe it, there is no denying the trend towards the digital. Josh Bernoff, synopsizes the digital-is-our-future argument well, in his story in this week's AdAge. He might disagree but what I think he is really saying has less to do with how the advertising is presented and in what medium and more to do with the fact that advertisers want results- measurable, verifiable, results. Digital advertising is ready made to measure response. But it can be done in print. At Mediabids, we measure the results of thousands of ads and when measured, newspapers and magazines generate very respectable results, oftentimes outperforming digital from an ROI perspective. So, Bernoff may be wrong about the speed of the gravitational pull toward digital, but he is right about why digital is so appealing to so many advertisers right now.

Here is a portion of Bernoff's story:

In this recession, marketers have learned that interactive marketing is more effective, and advertising less effective, per dollar spent. While budgets for online have decreased, they decreased less than other budgets. Six out of ten marketers we surveyed agreed with the statement "we will increase budget for interactive by shifting money away from traditional marketing." Only 7% said "we have no plans to increase our marketing budget."

Unlike the last recession, digital marketing is no longer experimental. Now it looks more like advertising is inefficient, relative to digital. More than half of the marketers we surveyed said that effectiveness of direct mail, TV, magazines, outdoor, newspapers, and radio would stay the same or decrease within three years. In contrast, well over 70% expected the effectiveness of channels like created social media, online video, and mobile marketing to increase.

The result is that digital, which will be about 12% of overall advertising spend in 2009, is likely to grow to about 21% in five years. Along the way overall advertising budgets won't grow much.