Back in 1999, the buzz at Seybold Seminars was digital printing. Or was it variable-data printing? Wait a minute, maybe it was cross-media publishing? Take your pick, at some point, one of these three solutions was hailed as the impetus for the next great publishing revolution.
The Contenders
Let’s take a look at the runners-up first.
Digital Printing. Obviously some revolutions unfold slower than others, some not at all. Take digital printing, for example. In the winter of 2000, seven percent of all design and production firms surveyed said that digital printing was an important sales opportunity. Two years later, only five percent say the same thing, according to a study by TrendWatch Graphic Arts.
Why the drop off? In part, problems with technology, though many of the glitches have been worked out. The real stumbling block is education.
“It’s all about educating print buyers as to the advantages of digital printing,” the report said. “This is tough for printers, because digital printing is not a commodity like offset printing has become. It’s still a value-added sell. And until printers begin to understand solutions selling, rather than product selling, they are going to have a tough time selling creatives on the value of digital printing.”
Variable-data printing. Another technology that burst upon the scene with great enthusiasm and promise, variable-data printing in theory is a dynamite marketing tool. You take a mass mailer and customize it for myriad demographic groups or even individuals if you’d like. We see examples of VDP all the time in catalogs that provide special offers or coupons based on one’s buying history. But what if you could create custom catalogs, complete with different products and copy, all based on predetermined preferences or demographic inclinations?
Sounds great, but VDP has been squelched for a number of reasons. “First, again, few printers or production firms know quite how to sell the benefits. And only a few print shops are really set up with the proper infrastructure and applications to fully utilize the power of variable-data printing,” said TrendWatch.
Plus, VDP is all about convergence and there hasn’t been much of that lately.
“Finding the intersection of all the ‘right’ aspects of this market — the right customers, the right infrastructure, the right applications, and the right sales strategies for these applications — are what make a successful variable-data printer.”
In short, variable-data printing is a very complex and niche-oriented marketplace, and hence for creatives, it has never been a particularly promising sales opportunity. Except for a few niches, it’s doubtful it will change anytime soon.
The Winner
What’s still standing?
Cross-media publishing. Though the term is notoriously nebulous (anyone who as taken some print copy and repurposed it for the Web can claim to be a cross-media master), cross-media publishing is on its way to becoming a marketing essential.
The folks at TrendWatch define cross media as: “any design/publishing project and/or communications campaign that involves the more or less simultaneous publishing of content in more than one medium such as offset print projects, digital print projects, wide-format printing, Web sites, wireless (PDA mobile phone) CD-ROM, streaming media, and broadcast on television cable or radio.”
Now, it’s not quite fair to compare cross-media publishing to DP and VDP. The latter two are specific technologies, while cross-media publishing is a concept. On the other hand, cross-media publishing is highly technology dependent and it looks just as good on your company’s capabilities list.
Magazine and book publishers are doing the most cross media publishing, followed by internet design and development firms, and then design and production firms. In this last category, ad agencies are chalking up the most cross-media work, followed by corporate design departments, graphic designers, and commercial photographers.
Half of publishers say cross-media capabilities are strategic to their business survival, but they report only a few clients are actually requesting cross-media projects. Four out of 10 (42 percent) design and production firms say that cross media is strategic to their business survival, and most firms report that cross-media projects are requested by at least a few clients — almost one-quarter (22 percent) of firms report that cross media is requested by a few clients regularly. Only 4 percent say it is not important at all, according to the study.
More than half of all Internet design and development firms say a few clients regularly request cross-media projects. Oddly, only 19 percent say it is strategic to their business. But as the cross-media equation becomes about more than just print and the Internet — for example, wireless devices, cell phones, etc. — cross-media will play an important role for these firms.
The Leaders
When it comes to tools for implementing cross-media solutions, publishing firms are more likely than other creative firms to use desktop publishing tools with special cross-media publishing features. TrendWatch found that nearly one-fifth of publishing firms use XML and other automated publishing tools. Thirteen percent of publishers manually reformat files. Design and production firms are more likely than publishers to just manually reformat files for the appropriate medium — 73 percent of design and production firms handle cross-media projects this way. Only 16 percent use desktop publishing tools with special cross-media publishing features like avenue.quark (an XML XTension to QuarkXPress) or Adobe InDesign 2.0 with XML tagging capabilities. And only 1 percent use automated cross-media publishing tools such as XML.
The slim showing for XML among designers is perplexing at first, but easy to explain. “To get the most out of XML and related tools, you need more of an IT infrastructure than most design firms have. The companies doing the most with XML publishing are those that have the technological resources to work with the arcana of Document Type Definitions, XML applications, and such.”
In many ways, XML (and indeed cross-media) publishing is currently in a state comparable to where HTML publishing was seven or eight years ago — a thick, code-heavy process more suited to programmers and techies than designers. But as was the case with HTML, TrendWatch expects the tools to evolve toward a more intuitive, less code-intensive.
The Bottom Line
Creative professionals sniffing around for new capabilities and marketing hooks shouldn’t put too many eggs in the digital printing basket. Understand its capabilities and learn how to clearly articulate its benefits to clients, but don’t expect clients to jump on board for the novelty of it. Ditto for Variable Data Printing. If the right candidate steps forward, sell the benefits like crazy, otherwise, don’t expect clients to change their marketing mindset or efforts to take advantage of this technology.
Cross-media publishing holds the most promise because you can utter the phrase “Save Money” during the conversation. In these days of skimpy budgets and gun-shy managers, anytime you can put the bottom line on the top of the list, you’ve got someone listening a little closer.
Read more by Eric J. Adams.
This article was last modified on January 3, 2023
This article was first published on November 11, 2002
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