Something to Hold

Print was filed under cost

For fifteen years the brand budget moved in one direction. Off the page and onto the screen. Brochures became landing pages, annual reports became PDFs, and the launch book became a carousel. The logic was sound at the time. Attention had moved to the phone, and the people telling brands to follow it were right. Gary Vaynerchuk built a career on that argument, telling companies they were declining because they kept spending on magazines and television while their customers were on Instagram.

The side effect is that a generation of marketers has never commissioned a print run. They have never chosen a paper stock, argued with a printer over a Pantone match, or watched a foil block come off a Heidelberg press. Print was filed under cost, and the people who could design for it stopped being hired. I started in the late nineties, when the whole fascination was taking a design from your head to the screen and then onto something you could hold. That skill is now scarce, and scarce is where value goes.

AI has made content free

Generative tools can now produce the copy, the image, the video and the deck. Brands that once published ten pieces a month can publish a thousand. Most of it will not be read, and the audience knows it. The first instinct on seeing a polished image is no longer admiration. It is suspicion. Was this made, or generated?

AI made content free. It made the printed object rare.

That is the real cost of the AI era for brands. Not that the work is bad, but that it no longer carries weight. A screen cannot tell you whether something took a team six months or a prompt six seconds. When everything can be made instantly, nothing on the screen signals that someone cared.

The middle is what disappears

The sharpest read on this comes from the man who told everyone to leave print. Vaynerchuk's position in 2026 is a barbell: extreme AI on one end, extreme analog on the other, and a middle that gets squeezed out. VaynerMedia has hired a head of experiential and is pushing clients into physical stores, sampling and live events. His own words: the explosion of AI is the precursor to the explosion of analog.

The people who told brands to leave print now say the middle is dead.

He rarely says the word print. He talks about rooms, stores and run clubs, and in January 2026 he called physical collectibles the most underrated marketing move of the year: trading cards, comic books, limited-edition cans, a card in the cereal box like it is 1965. Every one of those is a printed object. Print sits on his analog end of the barbell by definition. It is physical, it is finite and it cannot be regenerated with a different prompt. Capital One is opening cafés. Ralph Lauren, Coach and Tiffany run restaurants. The direction of travel is from the feed to the thing you can touch.

From screen to object

Print has to be rethought as the analog end of the brand, not a leftover from before the website. The question is no longer "do we still need a brochure." It is "what does this brand look like as an object." The thing you hand someone at the end of a meeting. The thing that stays on the desk after the deck is closed. The box the product arrives in, and whether anyone keeps it.

Digital printing has changed the economics of this. An HP Indigo run of fifty books costs what a run of five thousand once did, and every copy can be different. The barrier is no longer the press. It is whether the brand has anything worth printing.

A book is not a brochure with better paper

Of everything we have produced in print, the coffee table book is the format people become attached to. The reason is editorial, not material. A book forces a brand to decide what deserves to last. It cannot be scrolled past, updated next week or quietly deleted. It has to be edited down to what the brand is willing to stand behind in ten years.

Nobody keeps a PDF. People keep books.

That discipline is the strategic value. Assouline, Taschen and Rizzoli built global businesses on the fact that people pay for weight, paper and a finished thought. The same instinct applies to a developer's launch book, a hotel's anniversary volume or a founder's story. The book becomes the reference. Every deck, website and campaign that follows is checked against it.

A brand that exists in the room

What this creates is a brand that exists in the room, not only in the feed. An object that is kept, passed across a table, left in a lobby and opened again a year later. In a market flooded with the generated, something that was clearly made. Gifting, packaging and books are not the nostalgic end of branding. They are where the brand proves it was willing to commit to something that cannot be undone.

In a market flooded with the generated, something that was clearly made.

The screen will carry more of the brand every year. That is exactly why the printed object will carry more of its value. Build for the feed, and you compete with everything. Build for the table, and you compete with almost nothing.