Against the grain

The spin cycle of greenwash

Steven Kiernan — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 13:46:00 GMT

I love that little self-congratulatory feeling I get when I do something good for the environment. The easiest way to give myself the eco-friendly warm and fuzzies is when the green option is also the path of least resistance, like when I drop a printed proof of this blog into the recycling bin below my desk instead of the trash (which just so happens to be an annoying distance away on the other side of the office).

Hotel towels have always been a great source of inspiration for one of these easy eco ego massages. I'm talking about those little placards by the shower in the hotel room that say: "Unnecessary washing wastes water and harms the environment. Be part of the solution. Hang your towel on the rack to re-use it. Leave it on the floor to have it washed." With a sweet sigh of contentment, I'll always hang my towel back up. I'll spend a moment taking pride in my selfless act of environmentalism (forgetting, for that moment, that my towels at home are only deemed ready for the laundry if they fail the 'sniff test').

Do you also celebrate this same little victory for Mother Earth? Then stop reading now, because I'd hate to be the one to burst your soap bubble when I explain that hotels don't employ this practice for the environment – they do it to save money on the cleaning bill. This practice dates back to the golden age of green marketing hyperbole, and helped coin the term 'greenwashing' (a composite of 'whitewashing' – the laundry connection was coincidental).

We're all at the mercy of overzealous environmental marketing day in and day out. It's so rife that the Advertising Standards Association (ASA) is on red (or perhaps green) alert. One recent casualty to the ASA's policy on greenwashing includea an absolute corker from Shell, whose marketing said "We use our waste CO2 to grow flowers". The actual amount was found to be somewhat too low to warrant a national press advertising campaign – 0.325% of emissions make it to a flower bed.

I must, however, applaud a brewer in my native Australia for marketing an "eco-beer" – the stubbie that just keeps on giving. But surely a carbon neutral lager would be flat?

Working in print means working with paper, which means turning the greenwash radar to full strength. I remember early this year when the villain in the final Harry Potter novel was not Voldemort but a lack of FSC-certified paper for the Finish-language version. Apparently JK Rowling had a diva moment and demanded only FSC (Forest Stewardship Council) paper be used for the edition, throwing the Fins in a spin because they generally opt for the rival PEFC (Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification) scheme. Ignoring the fact that the story turned out to be hogwash at Hogwarts, the underlying fact is that FSC certification has won a marketing battle against the more widespread and equally sustainable PEFC scheme. It has reached a point in the UK where people consider FSC as a the last word in Chain of Custody certifications. This is particularly strange in Europe as PEFC was created specifically as an alternative for the paper industry in our temperate climate – FSC had been created to protect against deforestation in the tropics). The danger of this greenwash is it distracts people from the real threat, which is deforestation in general.

For years, paper has been under attack, as imaginary swathes of pristine Amazon rainforest were massacred to allow us to print out our emails (which always seem to take two sheets of A4 cartridge paper because, ironically, the single line containing the words "Do you really need to print this email?" are knocked over to the otherwise blank second page). In fact, the National Association of Paper Merchants (NAPM) is using its 'Two Sides' environmental campaign to show that far from being the great evil, paper production is completely sustainable. According to figures the NAPM sourced from the Australian Paper Industry Association: "The paper industry has eight representatives in the UN's list of the world's 100 most sustainable companies, more than any other industry."

So victim, rather than perpetrator, of negative environmental marketing?

Well yes. The confusion arises when paper companies start using facts of their sustainability as proof that they are intrinsically caring and compassionate souls with a policy of conservation for conservation's sake. The simple fact is that to make profits from a chopping down forests, you need to replant them. It's a commercial imperative, not an environmental one. When those facts are muddled, it's just the hotel towels scenario by another name, and the sniff test reeks of PR spin.

Turn about-face on that brave face

Steven Kiernan — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 15:41:00 GMT

You’ll never guess where I was last week. I bet you. Go on, name your price.

Drupa.

That’s not entirely true. For one, I was in Hamburg, not the fair Fair city of Düsseldorf. For two, Drupa is but a fading memory. Instead, I was sent to our trade journalist cousins at Druck&Medien magazine to complete a review issue of the Drupa Report Daily, the exhibition newsletter we produced at the Messe in June.

So, no, I wasn’t actually at Drupa. Probably lucky we didn’t bet.

When I cast my mind back to those 14 days last summer in Germany, they are rose-tinted days of yesteryear, a time when the global print market seemed to almost be a positive place, held aloft by dreams of automation, by colour managed flights of fantasy, by launches, investments, of green ventures, of partnerships, alliances, of expansions. It was a fortnight capped by a seemingly never-ending string of zeroes attached to the sales figures of show exhibitors.

How times have changed, eh.

The dire state of the market – both for printers and printing equipment manufacturers – really hit home for me last week when I was reading (recent) quotes in that Drupa Report Daily review issue. In it, exhibitors boast about record Drupa sales figures and glorious futures. I flick to printweek.com and the stories are of those same manufacturers sliding into the red. KBA’s reason? "A sizeable volume of contracts negotiated at Drupa" failing to go through.

You can’t really blame those press customers for defaulting. I hear Iceland’s bid for a €4 billion loan was rejected by both the US and EU – if a whole nation once famed for the strong balance sheet of its finance sector can’t even get a loan, then there can be little hope for a print firm.

So – surprise surprise – suppliers exaggerate the positive spin of their economic situation: it’s not like they’re going to admit the sky is falling.

But don’t printers do the same? Who actually tells their customers that below-cost prices are killing them, not to mention the industry? At the recent Stationer’s Debate on print management, someone urged printers to tell their customers just how much pain low prices were causing. To show a buyer your margins. To explain that quality print costs money and buyers should pay more for it.

Tell that to Wyndeham and Southernprint.

But as Jo Francis pointed out in her recent blog, even Polestar, which has been blamed before for forcing market prices down by selling print at a loss, faced the same exact problem, complaining of being undercut 30% on a magazine job. If only Jo’s (tongue-in-cheek) idea of an OPEC-style body for web offset printers could come to fruition. Australian box-making behemoths Visy and Amcor certainly thought it a good idea and through the mid-90s would hold secret meeting in backstreet Melbourne bars to fix prices for cartons. They were eventually busted and Visy CEO Richard Pratt was slammed with an AU$36m fine, the single biggest personal fine in Oz history. Up in this hemisphere, the courts have raged with multi-million pound fines for paper price cartels involving the likes of Arjowiggins, Stora Enso and Metsäliitto.

Most UK printers would struggle with the logistics of organising a secret price cartel (although no doubt they’d agree the Aussies had the right idea by meeting at the local pub). But perhaps there’s some happy medium between an illegal, anti-competitive cartel and an association to promote sustainable economics in print, some rose-tinted future, where printers are held aloft by dreams of fair prices and the flights of fantasy of reasonable cost structures.

Sun sets in the East

Steven Kiernan — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 16:16:00 GMT

I’ve been utterly grief-stricken this week. I find myself sitting in front of BBC at 7pm staring blankly at The One Show with a sense of mourning. On the tube to work today I turned to the Metro freesheet’s sport section with sadness. My mind has been wandering to Mr Wu’s famous restaurant in London’s Chinatown, wondering whether it serves bird’s nest soup.

No, the grief is not due to poor TV programming, or dull sports journalism, or even a hunger from MSG-laced greasy cuisine. It’s not even the dismal "summer" weather.

It’s Olympics Withdrawal Syndrome (OWS). So in a forlorn attempt to revive mine and the nation’s spirits, I hereby stand atop the podium of print and raise our industry’s flag.

40,000 fellow OWS sufferers headed to central London for the handover ceremony last Sunday in The Mall, which was lined with 26 large-format London 2012 flags and fence signage thanks to Essex-based approved supplier Piggotts. The 220-year-old printer produced more than 700 polyester banners for distribution across the UK as far afield as the Channel Islands. A grand total of 200,000 people flocked to sites across the UK: 20,000 in Cardiff; 30,000 in Liverpool. Some 10,000 even poured into the streets of Belfast despite Northern Ireland being mysteriously left out of the Games due to the conspicuous branding of ‘Team GB’.

Wouldn’t ‘Team UK’ have been somewhat more inclusive?

One British print icon who couldn’t have felt left out of Beijing 2008 was screen printing aficionado and comics creator Jamie Hewlett. Like them or loathe them, it would be hard to have missed Gorillaz illustrator Hewlett’s Monkey Magic i-dents for the BBC coverage of the Games.

Not to be outdone, another Hewlett (in this case Packard) threw support behind the Olympics, reminding us there is more to the Olympics that just the four-yearly summer variety. HP has contributed $1m to the 2009 Special Olympics Winter Games, while more than 300 HP employee volunteers will be on hand next year in the host city of Idaho to provide technology and logistic support.

However, it was rival digital manufacturer Kodak that this year drew back the Silk Curtain as ‘official imaging sponsor’ of Beijing 2008. It was a photo finish for the Nexpress, which produced on-demand print, such as photobooks, postcards, newsletters and posters for the event. The digital press was certainly close to the hearts of Games superstars such as Usain Bolt and Michael Phelps – security badges printed on the Nexpress adorned athletes, officials and volunteers alike. Not everyone got the wear a medal, but in a nation that is so, shall we say, ‘security conscious’ as China, the security badges were the must-have fashion accessory.

Just as those athletes who left Beijing with a medal around their necks were buoyed with success, so too was the entire UK lifted by the nation’s record medal haul. And not wanting to rain on the tickertape parade, I must conclude with an apology. Back in Printing World’s July cover feature on tendering, I foolishly predicted that at Beijing 2008 (and I quote): the UK’s “sportspeople would be left in the dark as rival contenders notch up far superior medal counts”.

Let’s call that statement poor foresight rather than Australian egotism (or sloppy journalism!).

So from a native of one great sporting nation (that this time only managed a measly sixth on the medals table) to another, I must congratulate Team UK, erm, Team GB’s sterling performance.

Roll on London 2012.

What came first: the chicken or the iGen?

Steven Kiernan — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 11:26:00 GMT

Spread the word – guys like kit. Whether salivating over a Bugatti Veyron, considering refinancing their mortgage to pay for a new TAG Heuer chronograph with close consecutive times register and tachometer scale, or spec’ing out a 12-unit long perfector to hit 18,000sph, there is something very male about flashy gadgetry. So it’s little wonder that when e-paper (the kind of coated grade The Stig would procure) got it’s first major commercial outing, it was on the front cover of a men’s magazine.

US magazine Esquire is equipping the September issue with an electronic display on the front cover. Like the limited edition £840,000, 1,000bhp monster Bugatti, the e-paper front page is so expensive that the E Ink display has been limited to 100,000 of the total run of 720,000. Esquire editor-in-chief David Granger was not one to downplay his achievement, calling the special edition cover a response to the print industry’s "lack of progress" since the nineteenth century.

And here’s me thinking the invention of offset lithography, desktop publishing, computer to plate, digital printing, and even the PUR binding that holds Esquire together, were all examples of progress in print. Apparently not.

Perhaps Granger could be accused of bluster and bravado. He is American, after all. But there’s also some truth in his statement. Back at the dawn of the new millennium, in those halcyon days of my youth at university in Brisbane, Queensland, I wrote a paper on electronic ink, and how it was about to revolutionise publishing and sound that long-postulated death knell of print everyone keeps banging on about.

Why has commercial e-paper taken so long to materialise? I think it is a case of ‘technological determinism’, an academic theory that once handed me a knock-out blow at the end of 12 rounds of ego-posturing intellectual sparring in the campus refectory (yes, Queenslanders can do intellectual debate, even when trying to focus on standing in line for a meat pie at the tuckshop).

The phrase comes from the academic idea that society’s technology determines its values, structure or history. Basically, do we invent a piece of technology to fulfil a need or do we invent new needs because technology can fulfil them? Did the dotcom bust of the early 21st century occur because we weren’t yet interested in running our businesses and living our lives online, or was it that the sub-standard technology and snail’s pace dial-up connections couldn’t provide us with a viable model for the e-commerce and social networking that is now so prevalent? In a print context, you could ask the same kind of chicken-or-egg question: Is variable-data print a growth area because the market has long demanded personalisation, or is it because digital print technology can now offer variable information?

I was talking to Xerox’s monochrome expert Malcolm Glynn yesterday, who said there is a huge upturn in demand for black-and-white print. Glynn says he’s suddenly having conversations about quality of digital B&W for the first time in about eight years and thinks B&W will be an integral part of the fledgling transpromo market. Rather than purely market demand, it seems that technological developments, such as flash fusing to rapidly dry high-resolution toner-based B&W prints, have helped put high-quality monochrome back on the agenda.

Printing World’s Amy Golding will be looking at print buyers’ understanding of digital print for our September issue (alas, no e-paper cover). She has found that many print buyers, and moreover the marketing departments behind them, aren’t clued up to the new applications offered by digital print. I was chatting with Real Digital International’s sales and marketing director Andy Ruddle, who echoed these sentiments with a story about a recent job for a high-profile publisher. It was up to Real Digital to explain how the technology of digital could help determine the overall approach Ruddle's customer took to its campaign, rather than just discussing prices and run lengths. Xerox says it is having similar conversations with marketing departments to show them the capabilities of digital.

How many printers are also having these types of conversations with their clients? It’s not enough to just talk about economic short runs or personalising a piece of print with the recipient’s name – digital technology offers so much more. There's a real opportunity to get closer to your customer while winning more high-value work thanks to the functions of modern digital equipment.

As gadget-obsessed guys would accept, it’s not just important to brag about the time-keeping accuracy of your TAG watch, but also the 17 extra functions, including the choice to synchronise with time zones in New York, Sydney or the Mars landing site and the fact it tells you the current temperature in the Mariana Trench. It's not just important to brag about your digital press, but all its extra functions and applications you could offer customers. Spread the word upstream about the power of print.

Workflows and work flaws

Steven Kiernan — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 10:53:00 GMT

How do you link Adam Smith, a holiday to the Isle of Wight and a Honda TV ad? Well, if you want to make your Friday morning easy, don’t try. But if you’re determined, as I am, then some kind of structured approach, a workflow even, would come in handy.

For the September issue of PrintBuyer, I’ve been looking at marketing campaign workflow software, known as Marketing Resource Management systems, or MRMs. These clever little pieces of software have been devised to streamline the process of taking those creative ideas dreamt up in latte-fuelled brainstorming sessions by a bunch of hot-desking, beanbag-lounging creative types and turning them into well-produced piece of print, preferably at rock-bottom price.

As a case study of these types of workflows, Honda uses market-leading MRM Aprimo to coordinate marketing collateral procurement across its network of dealerships. As a metaphor for workflow, look no further than the self-same car manufacturer and it’s classic ‘Cog’ TV ad, the one where the car parts (85 car parts, in fact) roll, bounce and pitch their way across the screen, each forming a little piece of a chain reaction that concludes at the point we’re told to go buy an Accord.

Now that is workflow perfection in action. Every participant and step in the process working without a single fault in one unbroken camera shot. Well, without a single fault on the 606th take. It actually took 605 failed attempts to get it right. You might call them ‘workflaws’.

While Honda didn’t actually use a workflow software product to drive that campaign through to the dazzling incarnation on your TV, MRMs do offer a host of functions to connect the steps on the campaign trail, from strategic planning, budgeting, financial tracking, multi-channel campaigns, content management and performance measurement. They can also improve lower-level marketing activities through web-to-print-style procurement, such as Honda does across its dealer network.

Print workflows take the whole process to the next level. And their efficiency is down to one basic fact – getting rid of the human element as much as possible. Sure, whizz bang types, such as HP’s new SmartStream Director, offer a host of other functions, from web-to-print to personalisation to e-commerce, but in terms of production management and tracking, they succeed by taking over the drudgery and drone work. Computers are simply better at organising things.

If artificial intelligence ever does take over and go homicidal, as in The Matrix, it’d be bad news for we carbon-based life forms, but great for short lead times and process visibility. In fact, I’m currently researching a feature for PrintWeek's Drupa Technology Report about on-press quality control systems for sheetfed presses – the products revealed at Drupa by Heidelberg, Manroland, KBA et al for their top-tier presses are so advanced it’s almost scary. For instance, KBA’s QualiTronic Professional takes spectrophotometric readings of the colour bars on each sheet (at 18,000sph) and constantly calibrates and recalibrates the ink ducts throughout makeready and production to maintain colour consistency within a tolerance of +/-1 delta-E. It can also take a snapshot of each and every sheet and reference any potential faults, such as hickeys, against a datum sheet. Then it can tag any imperfect print with a mark that is read at the die-cutter or folder stage and the sheet diverted out of production.

If the machines ever do rise up, I wonder whether the real Terminator wouldn’t be better epitomised by a German long perfector than an Austrian bodybuilder.

It’d probably be a better actor anyway.

But while computers are still (mostly) tools that remain at our beck and call, I’ll continue to try to use them efficiently to streamline the most mundane tasks, such as planning my holiday. Apparently Brits spend more time looking for a holidays than a new home, which either says a lot about the state of the property market or tells you how much hassle goes with pre-planning a little trip abroad. It’s even complicated just trying to plan a mini break within Blighty; I’m currently trying to organise a trip to the Isle of Wight with a few friends and the string of emails, phone calls, suggestions and timetables that are flying back and forth are just mindboggling, and in terms of everyone actually getting any closer to the Solent, mindbogglingly useless.

It’s like one of those maths questions – take five people, each coming from a different part of the country. They are travelling at widely different speeds using a variety of means of transport and need to arrive at a single destination on a specific day at a specific time. How long will it take them to book tickets?

Now if only there was workflow software for holiday planning…

But for now, it’s down to a purely human organisational structure, which is another flawed flow. Adam Smith, “father of capitalism” and poster boy of the £20 note, realised there was room for improvement when he said you could create value by studying the nature of work itself, and hence gave birth to workflow as a concept.

Maybe Smith became the big daddy of workflow because he needed a way to coordinate his own competing interests, which in true Renaissance Man form spanned economics, politics, philosophy and astronomy. Or maybe it was because he was famously absent minded, one day wandering into a tanning pit in Glasgow, another time telling his London publisher he had forgotten he was the author of that magnum opus on capitalism, The Wealth of Nations.

Certainly another advocate of the beauty inherent in streamlined automation, one Bill Gates, didn’t forget this, giving a copy of The Wealth of Nations to Warren Buffet as a thank you gift after Buffet donated $30,000,000,000 to Gates’ charity.

What do you buy for the man who has it all and has just given it to you? A book on capitalism seems like a barely veiled swipe.

Print is demanding

Steven Kiernan — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 13:22:00 GMT

I’ve been running my own little print-on-demand division here in Printing World towers. I’m currently producing some public sector work from creative files distributed via an open-source document workflow. The software is supplied by Adobe and uses one of its PoD-centric file types. The RIP comes from Microsoft while the output device is a monochrome HP electrophotographic digital press. No, I’m not shucking off the desk-bound discipline of business-to-business journalism in favour of getting my hands dirty in the press hall…

... I just need to exchange my Australian driver’s licence for a British one, so I downloaded some information from the DVLA using Firefox, opened the PDF in Acrobat, changed some print settings in the Windows dialogue box then printed it off on our office Laserjet 4000.

I can also provide offline personalisation in black, blue or red thanks to a drop-on-demand marking system developed by the Bic corporation.

Getting the DVLA application is a fairly straightforward process, once you’ve also tracked down booklet INF1D, cross-referenced that with form INF38 and downloaded and read booklet D100, then ordered in the application form (which I don’t have the facilities to produce … yet).

I’m not the only one in on the PoD boom. One recent entrant is publisher Faber & Faber, which in May handed the print contract for its new Faber Finds operation to CPI Antony Rowe. Other rivals to my fledgling business may include Amazon with its BookSurge initiative, Lightning Source, HP’s new MagCloud venture and Google, but I’m confident they can be outmatched by some entrepreneurial spirit.

Investors better get in touch soon, otherwise I’m taking this to the Dragon’s Den.

Sure, there could be a few flaws in my business plan and inconsistencies in my balance sheet that might not stand up to the scrutiny of Duncan Bannatyne, but for those companies with the right foundation, PoD is a boom market. On one side, there’s the technology, with web-to-print storefronts capable of filling the digital press with personalised jobs for the individual consumer. On the other hand, there’s the global repository of material that we call the information super highway or worldwide web, which is brimming with ones and zeroes ready to be turned into hard copy. It obviously made sense to nationwide retailer Blackwell, which last month bought in the UK’s first Espresso Book Machine for on-demand publications, and has plans to roll the machine out to all 60 of its stores. Fuji’s in on the action in Japan with a service that allows Nintendo Wii gamers to upload images via the console, with prints produced and delivered to their home. The service stretches to photobooks of their in-game characters (known universally as an avatar, or, in cute Nintendo language, as a ‘Mii’).

And your avatars aren't limited to the 2D either – last year, I researched 3D printing and found that gamers can order 3D replicas of their characters on-demand, fabricated using ‘rapid prototyping’.

But lets put our toys aside for a moment – how will this affect the print industry? If you’re a copyshop, then print-on-demand is forecast to be one of the key drivers of your future success, as predicted by Frank Romano on behalf of Canon. If you’re an inplant, then rolling rote forms off your digital press makes more commercial sense than stockpiling quickly outdated materials, while also boosting your environmental credentials. And if you’re a commercial printer? Well, CPI Antony Rowe isn’t alone – Forward Press, MPG Books, Charlesworth Group and Polestar Wheatons are just a couple of printers in the PoD arena.

We’re an on-demand society. You can go home and sit on your Ikea sofa (ordered over the internet, delivered to your door, one screw left over) and try to turn on your Argos TV (ordered over the internet, delivered to your door, died after a week) to watch any programme using Sky+ (ordered via the remote, delivered to your set top box, still have to watch inane commercials) while eating your Tesco ready-meal (ordered over the internet, delivered to your door, still frozen because you bought your microwave along with your telly). Print on demand is just another step in our point, click and receive world, where getting your printed material is as simple as 1, 2, 3.

Or, in the case of filling out this DVLA form, as simple as 1, 2, 3, 4A (see note D over page and refer to section 13F of booklet IN1FD).

Wham! Kapow! Print!

Steven Kiernan — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 15:23:00 GMT

In the dark night of the soul that is the looming prospect of recession, who can help us? The government? The mortgage lender? The pawn shop?

How about Batman?

Well, yes. If box office figures of the film franchise’s latest installation, The Dark Knight, are anything to go by, then the economic crisis that has the rest of the media world in a spin is in fact pay dirt at the box office. Punters streamed through the turnstiles in the US last weekend to the tune of $158m… and counting. This makes it the biggest-ever American opening weekend.

Recession? What recession?

Sure, most of the money will line the pockets of overpaid studio execs in Tinseltown, but some will trickle down into the wallets of other media, including print. The Dark Knight will initially spawn a pop-up stand and poster frenzy in theatre foyers worldwide, along with a plethora of other collateral, such as building wraps, paper placemats for happy meals, colouring-in books, stickers, packaging of everything from crisps to Christmas crackers, plus (in a move either ironic or post-modern or both) comics of the movie of the comic. Miles of column inches across magazines and newspapers have been driven by film reviews and media hype, not to mention coverage of the untimely and lamentable loss of Perth boy Heath Ledger.

The film will create work for flatbed specialists with images bound to adorn vehicle livery – in fact, the iconic symbol was printed on Toyota’s F1 car at the British Grand Prix. And let’s not forget the $158m worth of entrance fees so far printed on paper cinema tickets. Plus the printed popcorn and frozen Coke cartons.

Of course, there will be the rest of the merchandising cash-cow with its associated print, from action figures (packaging) to lunchboxes (labels) and from clothing for people, such as inkjet or screen-printed t-shirts to, erm, pet costumes…

Then the gravy train will make a return journey when The Dark Knight hits DVD. One winning printer should be Warner Brothers supplier Creo Retail Marketing. Managing director Richard Saysell found his inner Jonathon Ross when he told me the The Dark Knight would be “the biggest film of Q4”. While Wossie will rate the ridiculously rewarding rollercoaster ride of a film with his review (just ask the Beeb presenter to say that quickly), Saysell could just as well be reviewing the size of its printed ancillaries.

For a firm like Creo, there’ll be the three or four different types of floor stands, a pre-launch standee, a launch standee, more point-of-sale cut-outs, floor media… the list goes on.

But all that print is still, well, just print. As Barney Cox points out in Printing World's upcoming August cover feature, future success in print may well be found outside traditional print and instead in the constantly expanding world of cross-media. Batman’s entire existence is not played out in Gotham, but in cross-media, whether it be the printed page, the silver screen, the telly at home, the computer games, the viral marketing campaign or the online trailers.

The same can apply to lucrative contracts for printers.

To reach the largest group of customers means using the largest variety of channels. The canny printer who becomes expert in opening up these different avenues for its customer to push out a message can expect more revenue streams to roll back into its accounts department.

So whether it is page-turning technology for digital editions of magazines, personalised URLs for your marketing customers or data management for complicated campaigns, printers can find fortune by becoming cross-media experts. The opportunities for work are as broad as the imagination...

... I might steer clear of dog costumes though.

An (off) licence to print money

Steven Kiernan — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 13:43:00 GMT

Being a printer used to be a licence to print money. Case in point: UK industry mythology has it that Patrick Howitt, ex-chairman of the eponymous Nottingham print firm, famously chartered a private jet to fly a jolly of journalists the 100 miles from Heathrow to East Midlands Airport.

I’m surprised they even had time to order drinks before touchdown (though being journos, no doubt they managed it).

These days, one of the only real licences to print money in our industry is, in fact, having a licence to print money. Take banknote specialist De La Rue, which time and time again took the highest denomination in the PrintWeek Top 500 UK print companies. However, the real money is in plastic: in June, De La Rue sold off its cash systems division (which makes ATMs and the like) for around £350m, which could see it lose its top spot and fall to around sixth in the next Top 500.

We Australians also know that real money is in plastic, our polymer-based banknotes being a source of national pride. This is especially true when you scam your British mates in a pub bet by waging they can’t rip a fiver in half, only to pull from your wallet the hardy Down Under version rather than the expected, and easily tear-able, paper pounds sterling.

The Oz cash sets a world standard and represent a true hybrid of more than half a millennium of print evolution, incorporating offset, intaglio and letterpress. Not only secure and near-on indestructible, it’s waterproof as well, especially useful when you jump in the surf still carrying your wallet.

But back to turning money-producing into money-earning – you’ll struggle to print money, either literally or figuratively, when you haven’t got a substrate to run through the press, a fact of which Zimbabwe is now well aware. German paper supplier Giesecke & Devrient this month bowed to local and international pressure over the “political tension” in the African nation and cut it off from the banknote paper supply. Which must’ve hurt G&D’s cash flow somewhat – we’re talking about a currency customer that issued a whole new set of banknotes in 2006 in order to lop off a few zeroes, then pulled a U-turn last year by introducing 14 new denominations ranging from $250,000 to $50bn… in a bid to stifle raging inflation.

Wacky plan it may seem, but you’ve got to trust the enlightened judgement of bank governor Gideon Gono, who put minds at ease by saying: “I know the zeroes we removed last time came back quickly, but this time we are doing it in such a way they will not return.”

Their national reserve’s in a safe pair of heads, then.

Surely Gono studied at the same school of media relations as leader Robert Mugabe; back in those halcyon days of late 2003, when his regime was still just about tolerated by the international community, Mugabe said of then Australian Prime Minister John Howard: “They tell me he is one of those genetically modified because of the criminal ancestry he derives from.”

Well, we were all thinking it.

Those same convict roots offer a good case for Australia’s banknote printing strategy. It may have taken 200 years to realise that a nation founded by criminals should put in place a few extra obstacles to counterfeiting, but eventually in our bicentenary year 1988, a lightbulb went on at Reserve Bank subsidiary Note Printing Australia and it introduced those first polymer notes, putting the country at the forefront of monetary security printing, and paving the way for free rounds at my local in London. And I’m not the only one turning dollars into pounds into pints – I actually heard someone hustled a free four-pack of Beck’s cans by using the note-ripping con at their corner shop.

Which is not really a licence to print money, but it’s definitely an off-licence for drinks money.

Don't judge a Pantone book by its colour

Steven Kiernan — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 10:41:00 GMT

I’m sure other Aussies would agree that there’s no better place to pinpoint the importance of colour management for branding than spending a Saturday night seeking sustenance at a West London gastro pub after the kitchen has closed. Ask any other Antipodeans in the area and I’m sure they’d agree (they'll be behind the bar).

All you want is a burger and chips (although, as it’s a London gastro pub, you would’ve had to settle for the pancetta-wrapped rissole with goat’s cheese, rocket salad and hollandaise on a semi-dried tomato and olive ciabatta with a side of paprika frites). But the chef's gone home, so instead it’s crisps and a beer. You sit down at the table, pint of proper British lager in one hand (which just happens to have a map of Oz on it), packet of Salt & Vinegar crisps in the other. You reach into the pack, pull out a crisp, put it in your mouth and…

… Prawn Cocktail!

You see, not only does the water flush the other way Down Under, but we are also certified to a different standard for our potato crisp colour space. Salt & vinegar is pink. Ready Salted flavour is blue. Chicken flavour is green. Marmite flavour is… well, Vegemite. Like so much branding, the connection is deep-seated and unconscious, built up through years of television advertising and hiding your lunchbox from the playground bully. For brand owners, these colour connections are sales and marketing dynamite. For printers (especially those looking for corporate clients), they provide a strong impetus to adhere to strict colour management principles.

Pantone has long been the dominant source for standardised colour matching. But even Pantone colours are less than standard, with different tones requiring an individual approach depending on substrate or ink formulation. Colour shift is also an issue, whether it be from mechanical variations during printing, ageing of the printed product, atmospheric stimulus or accidentally leaving your swatch book sitting on top of the radiator.

For the August issue of PrintBuyer, I’ll be looking at colour and brand management from the perspective of printers’ customers. This doesn't only apply to those obvious business giants and their corporate colours – colour management is a way to maintain brand integrity across all printed collateral. Think about a global auction house that wants to send the same fine art catalogue to a gallery owner in Kuala Lumpur and an art dealer in Prague. The printer will be different. The paper and ink may be different. The only constant among the variables is the £2m Monet on page four. Colour management can be the difference between continuity of collateral and a cancelled print contract.

But corporate colours make for the most obvious and simple examples of best practice. Or, in the case of those digital press manufacturers that can’t actually print their own logo with the inkset in their own kit, less-than-best practice. Pedantic? A colour shift of a few delta-E might not seem like an, ahem, hue-ge problem, but brand owners splash out massive sums on their corporate identities.

Not only do colours need to match across varied substrates, but also under many lighting conditions. To put it in plain English, metamerism (as it’s officially known) is a complex undertaking to create metameric matches of tristimulus values regardless of an image’s spectral emittance curve.

Punters too are canny colour customers. Upon returning from Drupa with a head full of printing technology and a belly full of that German favourite, long-life milk, I headed to the local Sainsbury’s for a half pint of some fresh stuff of the green-lidded variety. At my local supersize supermarket, I wandered in a daze up and down the dairy aisle, which in length terms is on par with Heidelberg’s exhibition stand. My vacant stare may have looked like the side-effects of a fortnight in the Messe Düsseldorf, but I was actually just plain lost in the hunt for semi-skimmed. I nearly cut my losses to take my business elsewhere. But, at the last moment, all became clear. Cunningly, the retail giant had undertaken a storewide product redesign – hiding in plain sight was the green milk, with a label more Pantone 3405 than the expected PMS 354.

At least, I assume Sainsury’s had overhauled their product design. Or maybe they just left the labels on top of the radiator.

Jargon busting

Steven Kiernan — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 13:14:00 GMT

Wading through the printweek.com forums this morning got me to thinking. They say “You learn something new every day”, or so the cliché goes. But after more than 1,000 days since first crossing the foyer in PrintWeek Towers, I’d offer my own personal, industry-specific version: “You learn something new about print every day”. Sometimes it’s a previously unknown concept, such as first trying to wrap my head around automated workflows (made somewhat more testing by not actually knowing what ‘workflow’ meant at the time). Other times, the lesson of the day has been historic (or, in the case of tracing the history of Kodak Versamark, it could well be a week’s worth of study*).

But for total confusion, nothing beats technical terminology. The minefield of jargon in the industry lexicon offers incomparable scope for befuddlement, and thus learning. When the word in question is, say, ‘piezo-electric’, the student of jargon needs more than just a one-line dictionary definition – a few chapters in a textbook, some overhead slides and a guest presentation from Xaar would be more helpful.

However, sometimes the words we use are so straightforward as to be completely confusing. Take ‘makeready’ (I had to phone a friend on that one). Or my personal favourite, ‘pileturner’ (only figured that one out when I saw a machine in action at Ipex. D’oh).

Now having made ready to get to my point, I turn this pile of build-up back to the printweek.com forums. If there’s any sector that can trump print for buzzwords, it’s the internet. And the jargon is, more often than not, a whole lot cooler.

Rather than prepare a PowerPoint presentation, I point you avid students to Adam Hooker’s story on Capital Print and Display. See how we've had to delete some of those posts due to “breach of forum policy”? Apparently some of those writers would be called ‘trolls’, dubbed so not due to a penchant for Harry Potter but in fact named after a fishing technique. And what about those members with anonymous monikers, or ‘handles’, who say their piece then quickly disappear? That’s ‘hit-and-run posting’. Then there’s those people who conveniently add a web address for their business to the end of their (often unrelated) posts – that’s called ‘spamming’.

And all of this is actually a breach of ‘netiquette’. When people forget to bring their e-manners, we end up with a bout of ‘flaming’, where one antagonistic comment leads to an equal or opposite reaction that turns into a full-scale virtual row.

Freedom of the internet is a beautiful ideal, but when a few handles forget their netiquette with a few hit and runs and some trolling that spurs on some full-scale flaming, there’s no legal option other than cleaning up the message boards. Which leads me to another take on the classic cliché, this one paraphrased purely for my old team-mates on printweek.com – “You delete something new every day”.

*Monday: Mead Paper. Tuesday: Eastman Kodak’s Diconix. Wednesday: Kodak Dayton. Thursday: Scitex. Friday: Kodak Versamark

Ink off paper

Steven Kiernan — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 14:27:00 GMT

Every Monday morning, I leave my weekly stockpile of used jars or empty bottles in the council-supplied green plastic tub outside for collection. And every Monday evening, I come home to find it half full of those same jars and bottles.

So every Tuesday, I double-check whether I’ve got the collection day wrong, again.

Nope. Monday it is.

So I then do what any other reasonable person would do – rehearse a long and morally superior phone call to my council to ask, pompously, how they expect Londoners to recycle more when they won’t even pick up my collection.

On one occasion, I actually made the call. And I quickly tumbled down the moral high ground when it turned out that they jars and bottles just weren’t clean enough to enter the waste stream.

Whoops.

Which brings me, circuitously, to paper recycling. If printing is basically about putting ink on paper, then paper recycling is all about cleaning it up and getting ink off paper. 'De-inking' is a tried and tested craft, relying on processes refined over decades. And it was flung firmly into the spotlight at Drupa.

At the show, I met up with Axel Fischer, public relations officer for INGEDE, the International Association of the Deinking Industry. He came armed with a stack of information, test results and not an insignificant amount of passion about the dangers inkjet poses to the de-inking process.

The story goes that paper recycling plants are geared toward conventional offset and gravure inks. Dry toner fits happily into the same system (in fact, some leading toner manufacturers’ print is said to have the best performance). But inkjet - that young upstart of a technology that so impressed pundits with a host of new applications and breakthroughs that the fair was widely crowned the ‘Inkjet Drupa’ – seems rebellious by its very nature.

According to Fischer, inkjet inks are too hydrophilic (‘water-loving’, if you will) and can’t be properly removed during recycling, thus muddying the paper. He was even more unforgiving about UV-cured inks and, in particular, HP’s Electro Ink, which, he claimed, break into big particles that end up peppering the final substrate with ‘dirt specks’.

Perhaps this wasn’t such an issue in inkjet’s infancy, when the quantities were low. But with Drupa exhibitors flying the flag for high-volume inkjetted newspapers and direct mail, the debate is only going to grow.

The line in the sand (or perhaps dry toner powder) has been drawn. Vendors and digital soothsayers are proselytising the dizzying possibilities offered by the technology. On the other side, recycled paper apostles are printing ‘The End is Nigh’ on their sandwich boards (with offset inks, I imagine) in preparation for the de-inking apocalypse.

But redemption is at hand. Or at least, it could be in the future. Solutions theorised range from the scientific, such as using biological enzymes and micro-organisms to dislodge those pesky particles, to the deterrent, such as branding inkjet printed products with a “Cannot be recycled” warning akin to cigarette packaging. The former would require significant restructuring to paper’s waste stream, while the second would surely sound a sustainability death-knell for inkjet, but they both show that answers are being sought. Print, long lambasted as a ‘dirty industry’, has again and again proved itself capable of evolving to meet environmental imperatives and market demands.

Going back to household recycling, come next Monday evening, my best-case scenario would be an emptied green tub sans jars or bottles (regardless of how well I scrubbed out that empty half pint of semi-skimmed). But it’s doubtful my local reprocessing plant is going to re-tool its cleaning department any time soon, thus throwing the onus back on me.

For inkjet recycling, the ideal outcome is undoubtedly different for the various stakeholders. Deciding whose solutionis best requires discussion and debate, and, thankfully, the inkjet de-inking issue is now firmly on the agenda.

Stick your hand out... or stick your hand-out?

Steven Kiernan — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 10:02:00 GMT

Print institutions across the country are suffering from undercapacity at their sites. “No, really?” drips your sarcastic reply. But I’m not talking about the shopfloors where staff spend their working lives, but rather the places they end up once their days at sharp end of a printing press are done.

I was gobsmacked to read on printweek.com that the Printers’ Charitable Corporation (PCC) has recorded a deficit because of undercapacity at one of its nursing homes. Am I the only one who finds this strange, especially in this, the age of the pension-deficit crunch? According to the Office of National Statistics, six out of 10 people of working age are not contributing to a private pension scheme, and things are not getting any better.

Listen carefully and you can actually hear the age of retirement making a Doppler effect as it disappears into the distance.

Printers, it seems, are just not that fond of hand-outs. In the same printweek.com story, the PCC said a measly 2% of its aid for victims of last summer’s floods had been claimed. Is this testament to the industry’s proud, battling-on nature, or are printers martyrs without a cause?

One thing that has long been overcapacity in the Printing World towers has been doom and gloom about the difficulties facing the industry. For some problems, there is the occasional respite: the rising euro could see work migrate back from the continent; the steady stream of shutdowns is putting more work back on the market and so on But as quickly as one dark cloud lifts, there is the crack of thunder on the horizon.

So don’t let a stiff upper lip stop you from taking advantage of small mercies, like charitable aid or somewhere to rest your weary bones after decades at the press face.

Finding meaning in the dreaded 'T' word

Steven Kiernan — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 11:19:00 GMT

The world turns and words turn with it. In archaic English, ‘let’ meant 'to hinder or delay', a polar opposite of its modern definition and one that only hits home when a tennis ball hits the net. The moniker ‘geek’, aimed at derided outcasts in the days of the pocket calculator and ZX Spectrum, is now worn as a badge of honour by the post-millennium iPod generation. Language evolves. Meanings change.

So when did ‘training’ become a dirty word?

For the May issue of Printing World, we’re talking to the industry’s training advocates. And what they say is at odds with printers’ trepidation to embrace the dreaded ‘T’ word. Forget skilling up purely for skilling up’s sake – for those fighting the training corner, it’s all about benefits to your business, often quantified by frank financial facts. Surely detractors can be wooed when training is defined in terms of the bottom line? Vision in Print’s Richard Gray says a third of the 230 courses it has run can be measured monetarily, and the average added value for those programmes is £128,000 in year one.

Better yet, Gray said the programmes also offer a 10 for one payback in the first year. How many printers are so overcapacity that a machine investment, even to clear the most stubborn bottleneck, could provide a 1,000% return on investment in just 12 months?

We’ll also look at how Polestar has not only embraced training, but pushed the boundaries, moving training out of the classroom and the shopfloor and into the ether of the internet. Students from its Print Dynamics programme don’t lug around heavy textbooks – all the coursework is stored on an iPod that fits snugly in the pocket.

Critics might point out that for every mp3 player loaded with information, there’s one less unit on an educational book printer’s order book. I’d say that’s a small price to pay if the workers of tomorrow have a handle on making print more profitable.

The death of print, or the beginning of a beautiful friendship?

Steven Kiernan — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 16:45:00 GMT

In the space of a day, I have leapt across the yawning gulf between online and offline (or, somewhat less poetically, I changed jobs and moved from one side of the office to the other). Those same scaremongers who predict print will crumble against the unstoppable juggernaut that is the internet might also say my recent move from the dotcom boom newsdesk of printweek.com, where I was production editor, to my new role as deputy editor on Printing World, steeped in venerable history, is a step into the past.

Portents of doom about the death of print have filled our pages and (some might say ironically) our webpages for as long as I have been part of Haymarket Publishing’s printing division. However, more and more printers are disproving the doomsayers and instead painting a rosy future of collaboration and cooperation between print and the web.

In our upcoming issue of PrintBuyer, we look at how cross-media campaigns are giving printers new successes in the embattled direct mail sector. However, where viral marketing, text alerts and online banner ads all have a place, none of them are replacements to the printed product, but merely extensions.

In the media sphere, online news is undoubtedly going great guns, as I saw firsthand as part of the launch team for printweek.com and its sister site packagingnews.co.uk, but that doesn’t signal the death knell of newspapers or magazines. Video didn't kill the radio star. Amazon's Kindle ebook reader won't kill the novel. And online news websites certainly won't kill magazines.

Neither is it the end for print firms. The savviest printers, and publishing houses for that matter, are nurturing their role as communications providers in a multimedia world. The internet may add new weapons to their delivery arsenal, but print remains the cornerstone of their service. And it’s not just the big boys. The rise of hyperlocal media and marketing means smaller firms can get in at the ground level of a growth market.

So a move from the online world to the printed word is not a backward step in the slightest. Conversely, those that move from print into cross-media are not turncoats. Like it or not, technological breakthroughs like the worldwide web have created a new world order for communicating information and delivering a message. Print will remain a proud and effective medium for years to come, but as a partner to the online product, not a rival.

Print by numbers

Steven Kiernan — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 16:05:00 GMT

There's a case of double standards going on in print. Or is it triple standards? Either way, it's fair to say that controlling consistency in colour in a world of hard copies and soft proofing throws up a lot of standardisation issues that are anything but regular.

The first number to remember is 12647. Or ISO 12647, to be exact. Printers face a multi-coloured minefield in the search for this standard. And – if you'll humour me as I plumb the depths of colourful puns – it's a complex complexion saturated with value judgements and infused with shades of intricate detail, making it more than a little difficult for the average print journalist to illuminate the issue.

Basically, you could gather from that that I don't fully understand it (and also that I've pawed the pages in my thesaurus bearing entries for 'colour', 'hue' and 'shade' until the ink ran).

Now that my fount of synonyms has run dry, I'll turn to another journalist to spell it out. In a recent PrintWeek Product of the Week, Karen Charlesworth called ISO 12647 "a definition of the necessary parameters to ensure a reliable match between proof and print" as she reviewed a tool to help printers comply with the standard. And as the case for soft proofing becomes, erm, hard to ignore, any tools that helps bring regularity to colour quality are worth having. Especially as that standard now has a version for every colour of the rainbow, or at least, for seven different pre-press and print processes. There's a whole fleet of options for investment. The Guardian, for instance, has just picked ICS's Remote Director as it moves to soft proofing in its repro department, all the while angling for the lucky number 7 strand of ISO 12647.

In a one-standard-fits-all world, we could end there. But wait, there's more. It's all well and good to match colours from proof to press, but that relies on the substrate, the ink, the press, the RIP and, of course, the viewing conditions. For the latter, printers can also turn to ISO 3664, a standard that should be as at home in the print room as it is in the dark room.

If anyone else, like me, is still trying to get on speaking terms with these ISOs, I would advise trepidation going forward. Because according to print body Fogra, there's another standard on the way, this time the memorably titled 'TS 10128' for press specification. With only scarce details to go on, I won't pretend to offer educated advice on the looming standard, other than to say we'll be hearing more in the future.

So the holy trinity of ISO 12647, 3664 and the impending 10128 answer my first question – it is set to be a case of triple standards. And considering the constant developments and various incarnations spawned by ISO 12647, and the fact that colour management policy can be just one component of an overarching quality system like ISO 9001, you'll need to keep your wits about you to continue to play print by numbers.