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“We are the product of 4.5 billion years of fortuitous, slow biological evolution. There is no reason to think that the evolutionary process has stopped. Man is a transitional animal. He is not the climax of creation.”
Dr. Carl Sagan (American Astronomer, Writer and Scientist, 1934-1996)
“We are the product of 4.5 billion years of fortuitous, slow industrial evolution.
There is no reason to think that the evolutionary process of communication has stopped.
Printing is a transitional process. It is not the climax of information distribution.”
BoSacks Corollary
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The Modern Printer’s Evolution
Printers strive to adapt to publishers’ needs, offering mobile and e-mail marketing and more
by Alex Brown
Wherever you are going, there is a printer to accompany you on your journey. While putting ink on paper remains their primary business, most printers are ready to
expand the definition of their services. “We are in the business of storing, managing,
and distributing content,” says Michael Simon, president of Publishers Press. “We just happened to be doing it in print for the last 140 years, but in the future our digital content distribution mechanism can be every bit as effective.”
The primary areas most printers are developing are mobile marketing, content management,
document management, and e-mail marketing. But printers are testing many possibilities,
from ad sales for their clients (Bartash Printing, a Philadelphia coldset printer) to editorial photography (Quad/Graphics). At this stage in printing history, it
makes sense to brainstorm with your printer about where your work ends and the printer’s begins.
There are two main directions in which printers can expand: managing digital content
or operating in new media channels that parallel print. In the first case, a printer takes on tasks that publishers have traditionally performed, but undertakes them with high volume, state-of-the-art technology that individual publishers can’t
easily afford. In the second case, a printer is looking for what currently augments, and may eventually replace, print.
As an example of the latter, mobile phones represent a new medium for advertising and entertainment, and printers see a compelling analogy: what we were doing for publishers on paper, we can now do on servers and screens.
Brown Printing has leveraged the European expertise of their parent company, Bertlesmann,
toward developing mobile marketing technology. Released last year, B·Mobile makes
print interactive with mobile devices. Mark Treat, Brown’s executive vice president
of new business development, points out that mobile marketing started in Asia and has matured in Europe. “We’re bringing European ideas and technology to the US,” he says.
After downloading a reader, a smartphone user can scan 2D barcodes with B·Mobile
technology. A scanned barcode launches a web page on the user’s phone, which can
allow more interaction, collecting information from the user or delivering content, from coupons to commentary.
Mobile ticketing, which airlines have begun to use, requires a scanner at the airport
that can read an image from a cell phone. As retailers acquire such scanners, the possibilities of mobile marketing expand. A coupon, a sweepstakes entry, or the buyer’s demographic data can all be captured from his mobile phone at the point
of purchase. Treat identified Target as a retailer who has such scanners, and notes that Brown’s offerings include sale of scanners.
Mobile marketing can link publications to the publisher’s own social network or the popular networks like Facebook and Twitter. Reader engagement with specific
articles or general subject matter opens up to blog comments, tags, and forwarding.
Advertisers are now tantalizingly close to the two-way dialog they crave: pulling
data from consumers and pushing product information shaped by the consumer’s interests.
Brown also offers digital editions, in a partnership with Imirus. Treat sees a convergence
of mobile technology and digital editions ahead as the iPad and other tablets make the mobile screen a much bigger canvas.
Another new medium that parallels print is e-mail marketing. To get into the field,
Transcontinental Printing recently purchased Thindata 1:1, a company that specializes
in permission-based e-mail. Bruce Jensen, Transcontinental’s group vice president, says, “We want to be a multi-channel company. Print is still the core of many of
our customers’ businesses, but we’re following customer demand for new options.”
Transcontinental’s focus is on all marketing channels-they also bought a mobile
marketing company called LIPSO-but e-mail applications fit well with their customer base, which includes magazine, book, and catalog publishers, plus retailers.
Retailers have tended to set the pace for multi-channel marketing efforts. Jensen
and Nicky Milner, Transcontinental’s vice president of on-demand solutions, described
the range of efforts a grocery chain might use: loyalty cards to track purchasing behavior, an in-store magazine with coupons and recipes, free-standing inserts,
e-mail marketing tailored to the recipient’s purchase patterns or opt-in choices,
direct mail, a web site that responds to user interests, and mobile apps. All these
connection points allow the retailer to match promotions closely to customer interests, and stir in some editorial like recipes and cooking tips.
What the magazine publisher can take away from this is not only the multi-channel
sales approach, but the possibility advertisers will leap past magazines to reach readers directly. If readers can’t detect the difference between promotion form
a retailer and information from a publisher, magazines have even more to worry about.
Publishers have leveraged advertising from many companies to afford the creation
and distribution of high-quality writing and photography, and to afford developing
a targeted audience. As the distribution channels become cheaper, advertisers can
consider taking over for the publisher and isolating the advertising to their messages alone, along with sufficient editorial to entice the reader.
Milner believes a printer is especially capable of integrating multiple promotion channels. Transcontinental has also invested in content management systems, and she notes “For some of our sophisticated customers, any piece of information may
be used in nine to ten different places, from a web site to an e-mail newsletter to a magazine, all driven by consumer information.”
Which brings us to the other direction printers can go-offering services for content
creation and management. Publishers Press, for example, has created a content management
system through strategic alliances with various software vendors, with the printer serving as the integration hub.
“It’s a comprehensive publishing solution,” says Simon, “that will take our customers
to print to phone and to the web.” The services include data mining and data enrichment, content management, e-mail marketing and newsletters, and analytics.
This puts Publishers very much into a marketing partnership with its customers, which introduces the question of where the publisher should end and the printer
begin. “I’m trying to be the ultimate consortium for my clients,” says Simon, who emphasizes that Publishers Press can afford to invest and maintain state of the
art technology, but individual customers would have difficulty duplicating the effort.
Publishers Press also focuses on the mechanics of distribution to new channels, with web hosting and workflow tools for production. Several years ago, like most
printers, they also developed digital edition technology which they call ePub Express. Simon concedes “it’s now slightly lagging Zinio, but ready to leapfrog.”
This is a fruitful frontier, but challenging. All the printers interviewed for this
article had some toehold in digital editions, but all were also awaiting the impact
of the iPad on magazines. As the early apps from Sports Illustrated and Wired show,
both publishers and readers are still testing the boundaries of a new medium. Just making an animated page turn is not enough, while pouring hours of video into a magazine format may well be too much, in both download time and reader interest.
The cost/benefit balance is also up in the air, as publishers salivate over a mechanism
for collecting money via Apple, but look with dismay at both sales terms and reader price resistance.
Printers are prepared to develop or acquire digital edition technology, but as David Fry, of Fry Communications, says, “We’re in a no man’s land between what we can
do today and where we’ll need to be in five years, when users will consume content on all kinds of devices. It’s a beautiful world of the future, but to get there is painful and potentially expensive.”
Fry’s bet on the future follows two paths: lowering publishers’ costs, and increasing distribution to new audiences. To cut costs and streamline the entire editorial
operation through page makeup, Fry offers cloud publishing services. “The goal is
to provide everything a publisher might need to put pages together, manage ad pages,
move content to mobile devices, and track results. We put it all into cloud computing,” Fry says.
Fry integrates software from several vendors and acts as host. The print content management software uses Woodwing’s Smart Connection Enterprise and Data Plans Journal Designer, with connections to InDesign. The user gains all the benefits of document management-version control, a central repository, and collaborative
tools-plus a standardized approach to all aspects of content management, from pages to mobile to web.
To help publishers reach new audiences, Fry has partnered with nStein, the company
whose software powers websites for companies like Condé Nast, The New York Times,
and Hearst. “nStein is a web content management system that does semantic analysis
of text,” Fry explains, “and can generate links automatically and dynamically, finding related content that will be of interest to the user.”
These examples are only a portion of each printer’s new service portfolio. Your
options are even more numerous, as competing third parties also specialize in these
technologies, and printers are increasingly willing to sell new services unbundled from printing.
Publishers have three choices: develop similar services in-house to grow beyond
print, hire a supplier dedicated to the necessary technology, or expand the printer-publisher
relationship to include more services. Printers can make a good practical and economic case for continuing to serve as content managers and distributors, and are eager to continue their customer relationships into the future.
