Measurement
Why Print Media Fails the Breakeven Test
Print carried well in the model, a 1.9 week half-life and a respectable adstock multiplier. It still did not pay for itself in eleven of fourteen regions.
Mohit Luthra
Draft
~9 min
This post is in progress. The outline below is what it will cover — the full version lands shortly.
Breakeven is a harder test than ROI, and most channel reviews never apply it. ROI asks what came back per rupee spent. Breakeven asks whether what came back covered the cost of the goods sold to deliver it, and for a category with a 42% gross margin, the difference between those two questions decides whether a line item survives.
What this post will cover
- Why contribution ROI and breakeven ROI diverge, and the margin threshold where a channel flips from profitable to not
- Regional decomposition across fourteen markets, and the three where print genuinely worked
- Circulation overlap with television reach, and why unmodelled overlap inflates print