I've spent most of this week sitting in a large conference room on the banks of the Rhine listening to various kit manufacturers making grand statements about the future of print and their part in it. As of Thursday morning, there has been limited news, sadly, on product launches for Drupa, although with more than four months still to go before the show I can understand the companies' reticence.
But the overwhelming message at this pre-show press conference has been that digital print, especially personalisation, are the way of the future. Domino talked about the possibility of personalising newspapers with its the latest addition to its Bitjet range; Screen, Ricoh and others talked about transpromo and a number of other personalisation applications and how they will change the world.
I can't disagree that my response will be much better if I recieve a piece of direct mail, or a magazine, newspaper or bank statement which caters to my preferences and talks to me on a quasi-personal level. But there's a problem to which I haven't yet found a satisfactory answer: where does the data come from?
If your clients are banks, for instance, then they'll probably have a lot of information to hand. But if it's a smallish design agency, how much useful data will they have on hand about their own clients' customers? Probably not much.
So selling personalisation software and variable data-capable kit to printers is all very well. But it seems to me that a huge expertise is required in addition to all this. If you're, say, a B2 jobbing printer and looking to get into personalised print, where do you get the data from? Would the majority (or any) of your clients have good enough information on their clients that they could just hand it over to you? If not, it's then necessary to get data specialists involved. It's a huge investment for anyone to make speculatively.
In the current era of kit manufacturers setting themselves up as business consultants and strategy gurus, I think the onus is on the Screens, Xeroxes, Oces and others to help the smaller customers they're targeting get into this market. If they want to sell the kit, they should do all they can to help their customers make that business work - including going to the print buyers to explain what their technology can do.
I'm sure that variable data is the way forward, but there's a lot more to making a success of it than just kit and software.