HP has just pulled off a deal with global marketing services
firm Omnicom Group that may have serious implications for printers.
The deal covers Omnicom companies, including ad agency BBDO,
working to develop HP’s Imaging & Printing Group’s global strategy. While
that’s all very nice for the folks in ad land; what is more interesting for
printers is the other part of the strategic relationship. The HP Omnicom deal
is not a one-way street; under the deal Omnicom’s companies will use HP’s
printing and imaging technologies, or more accurately will use HP’s network of
print service providers for direct mail, packaging, marketing collateral, point
of sale and print ads, billboards and building wraps.
The two firms promise that they will conduct pilot studies
with several multi-national brands later this year to show how they can reduce
printing costs while increasing the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns.
With a global turnover of $12.7bn (£6.4bn) in 2007, of which
43% was traditional ads and 57% was marketing services, there’s a big chunk of
print work up for grabs there.
For printers that are in HP’s club that’s a great
opportunity, but for anyone on any of Omnicon’s print roster that doesn’t own,
or swiftly invest in, HP technology it’s potentially very limiting. Just how
tied down Omnicom firms will be to the roster of printers using HP technology
and how restricted they’ll be in terms of specifying work that fall outside the
remit of HP’s digital print production portfolio remains to be seen. Will it
mean litho is out for DM and billboards even if it makes more sense for long
runs and multiple locations, or have we reached a point where personalisation
and site-specific jobs make digital the obvious choice everytime? Not yet maybe,
but it seems that the trials this year will be a way HP hopes to make it more
so.
More deals like this may well be on the cards as the big
digital print vendors eye up the broader marketing services proposition and
look for tool to win the business of agencies and brand owners as well as
printers. Kodak has spoken of a similar model in the past.
And these moves point to the way that while it used be that
the smart printer picked the best press for the job and today it’s about the
right workflow, in the future it may be even more important that suppliers
provide not just the burgeoning business development services, but also access
to the business itself.
You could argue that it’s not fair and free, and it will be
interesting to see how clients react to being restricted in their print choices
by technology provider. This is further proof that increasingly the value of
print is not the marks on the paper but managing making those marks including
deciding what they are. If the overall cost of the print is small compared to
the overall campaign and if you need an integrated process to get from concept
to completion, what client is going to argue over pence per page if it’s small
beer compared to the overall benefits?
Next time you come to make an investment the choice of
supplier may not be just down to how their products perform but what work they
can help you get access to.