From YahooNews. Full story here

LIVONIA, Mich. – News Corp. subsidiary News America Marketing has agreed to pay rival Valassis Communications Inc. $500 million to settle antitrust charges.

Valassis, a marketing company that provides direct mail and coupons, said the deal settles lawsuits it filed in several states against News America Marketing. Among them is a jury decision in Michigan circuit court last July that awarded Valassis $300 million in damages. News America was appealing that ruling.

Valassis accused News America of threatening customers with price hikes for not offering exclusivity in marketing deals.

Meanwhile, News America argued that Valassis tried to force higher marketing rates by publicly announcing price changes.

In a statement Saturday, News Corp. said it did not want to risk presenting the case to a jury in Michigan federal court, where it was scheduled for trial Tuesday. Citing unspecified concerns over the venue in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan Chief Operating Officer Chase Carey said News Corp. decided "it was in the best interests of the company and its stockholders to agree to a settlement."

Valassis said the deal also includes a 10-year shared mail distribution agreement with News America.

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.

As a follow up to our diatribe yesterday on BusinessWeek consider this typically snarky comment from AdAge:

"Why the persistent drop for the business bibles? Business-to-business advertisers have found many more efficient, targeted ways to reach their customers. Brand campaigns remain an important component of their marketing, but they've also gotten much better at maintaining databases of the crucial decision makers who buy their products or services, focusing on preserving their loyalty and contacting them more or less directly than through a major magazine ad buy."

If you are in print - newspapers or magazines - this comment should really bug you. The author, Nat Ives, is wrong about the potential for print publications to generate response for non-branding campaigns but he is expressing a sentiment which is common in the advertising world. In other words, the advertisers you covet think he is right about magazines being a branding advertising medium. Further proof, that if print publications don't start proving response to their customers using any number of rudimentary tracking mechanisms (800#s, text addresses, unique urls), no one will.

Newspaper ads placed second in a Harris Interactive, AdWeekMedia, survey of most helpful ads by medium. Full story here.

Banner ads ranked last as the most ignored type of advertising.

The results of this survey are particularly surprising when you consider what a similar survey would look like if advertisers were polled. My guess would be (this is only a guess, a quick search for a similar survey didn't yield any results but I will keep looking) that advertisers would rank the effectiveness of mediums quite differently.Which means that advertisers don't really know what is really working.

Online advertising has response measurements built in- anyone can see how many clicks or views they have received. Newspapers and magazines have done a lousy job introducing similar measurement metrics. So, despite the fact that readers say newspaper ads are extremely valuable when determining future purchases, advertisers don't know it. The scary part is- neither do publications.

You want to know why newspapers' advertising revenues are down more than other mediums? Readership and competition are no doubt issues but the big one and the one that print publications can directly control is that advertisers do not see the value in the medium. If people in the print industry don't show them, who will? Please note: I said show, not tell. Print publications generate results but advertisers don't consider the tracking of results to be their job, newspapers and magazines have to do that job themselves.

At Mediabids, we have taken this approach, in many instances, for the past 3 years and it works. Advertisers still buy print when you can show them it works.