Printers! Take Your Mark! Get Set! GO!

. . . Or maybe I should be saying Marketers Take Your Mark. Either way, I’m seeing example after example of why printed communications need to become increasingly nimble to stay relevant in the marketing mix. I was inspired by a recent post from Pat Allen of Rock the Boat Marketing (and by the Old Spice Guy video embedded in the post)

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According to Pat, “the tilt toward real-time communicating exposes what we believe to be the greatest weakness in investment product communicating: Reacting after the fact and on a delay.” While she is looking at the asset management industry through a marketing lens – you could easily point that same lens at print service providers and in-house shops. “The Old Spice guy work is an excellent demonstration of an emerging communications competency: the preparing to improvise, the organizing to be able to react in the moment to external stimulus,” says Pat.

Old Spice Guy says “Now I’m on a boat. Look in your hand. Look back at me. Now I’m on a ship. Look at your man. Look back at me. I’m on a horse.” Can your communications shift that quickly – and look that good doing it? (Phew!)

There have been several posts recently about combining print and other digital marketing channels. Most frequently referenced is putting PURLs on direct mail. You know what? That’s already old hat. PURLs provide an additional channel for the recipient, which is good, but it is not necessarily preparing the marketer to be able to  react quickly to external stimulus from social media sites, breaking news or other market activity.

We need to enable our print campaigns to launch on a dime in support of trends gleaned from online activity. Of course, we will want to communicate with people who are already online through online means – but why not extend the learning to be able to launch the same great message to the customers we know don’t use our online channels? Or simply reinforce the online message with a tangible printed campaign?

Allen cites a social media presentation by Matthew Guiste, category manager for social media at Starbucks and successful revenue-generating programs that involved a rapid exchange of information, internally and externally. Starbucks identified mini-trends from activity on Facebook and Twitter and worked quickly to syndicate that content across multiple other social media outlets. They could also have launched a direct mail campaign – but sadly – with the response times of most organizations today – not fast enough to ride the wave of the current trend.

For direct mail (and transactional communications) to gain a broader piece of the “social media response” pie it will need to be faster and more collaborative with what is now a social media silo. If the collaboration and rapid publishing tools can be put in place – with workflows that link social media monitoring, analytics, content management, approval and production approvals – social media can be a great friend to digital printing rather than a competitor.

So, look at your social media channels. Look back at me. Look at your direct mail. Look back at me. Anything is possible. I’m on a plane (Seriously, I am.)

Last time we talked about ways Océ is helping customers build business with inkjet technology and how market acceptance of digital print quality has changed. Today, in the final installment of this interview, Mal Baboyian talks about how Océ is changing the way it presents itself to the market at big venues like PRINT 09 and gives us a glimpse of what the company will have on display in Chicago.

NW: Océ used to show only its high speed production presses at shows like PRINT or Graph Expo, but at recent shows you often have one or two wide format machines on hand. Why the shift?

MB: Océ has one of the broadest product lines in the industry covering the office, wide format, display graphics, and production printing. But even customers in these segments weren’t always aware of our other offerings and capabilities and didn’t necessarily think of Océ when they needed a different type of equipment. Having a wider range of equipment at shows strengthens our brand by showing the full scope of our offerings and helps position Océ as a leader in more segments of the printing market. We also share some technologies across the different divisions of the company and are always looking for ways to leverage what we know. As I mentioned, our inkjet experience in wide format aided us in developing the JetStream family. Many of our customers had no knowledge of Océ’s breadth of solutions in the office, production printing and wide format segments. And many of them have needs in more than one segment .
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As we saw in part three of this interview, Océ’s history in both toner-based and inkjet printing gives it good credibility as it rolls out its new inkjet systems. Still, for most print service providers, having equipment with a lot of capacity is only part of the equation. That capacity needs filling and profitability is still a basic business requirement. So, I asked Mr. Baboyian, what does Océ do to build capacity and help print providers get a bigger share of their customers’ wallets?

NW: OK. This is all good, and many printers I talk with see inkjet as having a lot of potential. But the thing they all say concerns them is being able to fill up a significant portion of the capacity of these machines. How is Océ addressing this and helping customers make the transition into inkjet?

MB: That’s a great question, and it really all comes down to applications and the importance of printers understanding their customers. When we first introduce a customer to the JetStream line we learn about all the applications they are running, who their customers are, and look for all the applications that make the most sense to print on a JetStream. For example, we know there are many jobs, especially in direct mail and transactional shops, that require preprinted forms. We’ve done the math, so we know that simply shifting these forms to inkjet adds a lot of volume to the press and will save the printer’s customer a lot of money. But as you know, that can a difficult conversation for some printers to have with their customer. So we provide the support our customers need when they introduce JetStream to their customers. We can help to explain the technology, answer questions, and show them, based on their current printing costs, how eliminating pre-printed forms can make a substantial difference in their business.
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Earlier this week Time Inc. announced an experiment they are conducting with a customized magazine dubbed “Mine.” The Boston Globe has the details, “Readers can select five titles from eight published by subsidiaries of Time Warner Inc. and American Express Co.: Time, Sports Illustrated, Food & Wine, Real Simple, Money, In Style, Golf, and Travel + Leisure. Editors will preselect the stories that make it into every biweekly issue, and readers won’t have the option of changing the picks from issue to issue.”

Rex Hammock of Hammock Inc, a custom media and social media marketing company wrote on his blog, “While the approach, technology and even editorial concept dates back decades, it is being touted as something new that “tries to mimic in printed form the personalized news feeds that have become popular on the Internet.” Hammock cites printing and binding technology that has been used to create customized publications.

Is a customized magazine going far enough? Has the time come for publishers to start using more personalization and 1:1 concepts to create a unique reading experience for the reader?

You can sign up for the free trial at https://www.timecmg.com/mine/. The first 31,000 respondents have the option of receiving the print version and an electronic version will be available to 200,000.