While print is changing in India as it is other countries, it remains a very effective tool in the armoury of media agency Lodestar UM.

So says chief executive Nandini Dias, who told Ifra India delegates last month that innovative ideas in printing could make it flourish amid digital disruption.

"A decade or more ago, it was all about the metrics not the medium, but now... print has maintained its effectiveness in creating desire," she said. "Our agency has the largest advertisers, and we map 64 touchpoints for display advertisements, finding that print and e-commerce work well together."

Dias told how successful print was for auto advertising, an important category for her agency. "We know which advertisement people are responding to with auto, which newspaper works best, which languages work best - it is a granular response, measuring everything."

Print had been used to promote the Toor Dal (or pigeon pea) lentil for a popular curry dish. The agency placed a seed in a newspaper, using the paper as a sieve, and offered a visit from a cook to each home to show how to cook it.

" We only used print so we could measure the response and it was huge," she said. "However, we know that digital makes the product look modern and up-to-date, so we tried a different approach with auto brand Mahindra, placing a video chip in a newspaper, which brought a huge YouTube response and boosted sales for the KUV100 by 16 per cent."

In another popular campaign - for carmaker Tata's new Zest model - the objective was to build test drive numbers, using geo and hyperlocal targeting: "We put a real key in Times of India newspapers to encourage people to visit dealers to see if their key fitted a car, and readers flocked in."