Who, in their right mind, would ever want to make a television commercial?

Print offers infinite, and infinitely more, creative possibilities.

(Still besotted with TV? Well, think of a print ad as a freeze-frame of inspiration that you can hold in your hands. Let's move on.)

But be warned. Print advertising is a medium for the courageous. Here you will find writers and art directors, alone on the page with nowhere to hide, completely vulnerable, their reputations resting on their talent irrespective of budget.

The lessons to be learned are invaluable. Notice how the winners rely on ideas executed with the appropriate craft. Notice the absence of irrelevant computer-generated trickery and predictable visual puns. Notice the power of pure illustration. Notice the power of white space. Notice also the use of wit, the many dry observations of life that don't come from studying award annuals but from studying life outside the agency.

Havaianas demonstrates the print ad as a poster. Look at these ads. You can feel the sand under your feet and the sun on your back. You can hear the surf. You can smell the tang of salt air. The product is the only visual. The colours and background motifs are beach culture come alive on the printed page. Someone clutching a margarita watching the sun go down might well have uttered the laconic headlines. These ads let me touch the sides of the brand.

The Stuffit Deluxe software campaign demonstrates how print can demonstrate. Having a technology brief land on my desk was always my worst nightmare. For years, I used computers as footstools. And I still believe that IT stands for Intangible Technology. So how do you explain something so complex that only a computer maven could grasp? Whoever did the Stuffit Deluxe campaign is a genius. The proposition jumps off the page in a nanosecond. The fact it makes you smile is a bonus. (The Japanese tourists execution is outrageously funny.) The art direction is immaculately simple. I was reminded of a big bucket full of little pictures, with a headline on top like a handle.

The Women Against Violence campaign demonstrates how print can prick the human conscience. By eschewing the usual grainy images of death and destruction, the campaign gets under the reader's radar. Instead, a brilliant insight comes to life on the page, an insight so startling that you are left in awe. Interestingly, great advertising insights are quite often painfully obvious. Why didn't anybody think of it before? (And specifically, why didn't I think of it before?) Notice, too, how the art direction exercises restraint, carrying you forward to the final, compelling fact.

Congratulations to all the winners. You have proved that print creativity knows no borders. Great print happens globally, in diverse markets, for a diversity of brands and causes. In print, every writer and art director has equal opportunity.

Finally, may I record some personal words of thanks to my fellow judges? They made the judging process a disciplined and inspiring experience. A shared passion for print became the sole guiding light in our search for winners. Every entry received proper, unhurried consideration. In the final stages, some really earnest, apolitical and articulate debate narrowed our quest for the creative truth. Frenchie, of course, was in his element; his love of great print (and his wise and witty chairmanship) kept us on our toes at all times.

As a result of the World Press Awards, newspaper and magazine owners everywhere now owe Neil French an enormous debt.