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Print and pixels: perfect partners? (0)

 

Longer ago than I care to calculate, before “new media” was a phrase even on the horizon, I spent years covering the printing and prepress industry while it went through its own sometimes confused, often exciting transition to digital.

So when I was asked to write a little think piece for the printers’ group FESPA, it was a trip down a rather muddy memory lane, but more importantly it was a chance to look beyond the narrow confines of digital OOH and consider some of the ways we might work with the broader communications sector.

Anyway, here it is.

Digital out-of-home is a new medium at much the same stage of development – and confusion – as the World Wide Web around a dozen years ago.

On the upside, there is excitement over its undoubted potential to reach consumer audiences with highly targeted and micro-controllable campaigns; there is rapid technological development underpinned by a rapidly-solidifying consensus on what constitutes the mainstream (LCD, SMS, SaaS...); there is an emerging understanding of how content should address the needs of both viewer and media owner/advertiser.

On the downside, however, there is a bewildering over-supply of tools with little practical difference among them; there is still no unanimity on the practicalities of audience measurement, although it is universally agreed to be necessary in some form; there remains huge variance in the quality and appropriateness of content, sometimes left to the tech guys with predictably clumsy results; and perhaps most critical of all, there remains a wide gulf  between the understanding of and enthusiasm for the medium shown by its early adopters and the mixture of scepticism, incomprehension and plain lack of interest often displayed by advertisers and their agencies.

But one man’s gulf is another man’s opening, and it is this disconnect between the digital out-of-home community and the broader commercial world that offers an opportunity for practitioners in other forms of communication.

Most attention has been paid to the potential synergies between digital out-of-home and other media from the point of view of the media owner – particularly online, TV and local press, all for different but valid reasons. Yet it would be a mistake to ignore the supply and manufacturing side of media, including the printing sector.

Just as they were with online, when many smaller firms found a fertile new market in Web design for their existing customers, printers are well-placed to move into the digital out-of-home sector. And the greatest opportunities are probably for the design-and-print shops rather than the larger, industrial-scale printers.

They can exploit their experience in acquiring and servicing clients who may not be highly media-aware, in translating a brief into a visual, in working across multiple media and coordinating campaigns (for many smaller printers serve as de facto advertising agencies for their clients), and in creating point-of-sale material. Those with a retail operation – the printer-and-stationers and the quick-printers – may even find that the simpler, plug-and-play digital-signage packages are a suitable fit with their existing line of products and services.

How these synergies are brought into practice is likely to vary greatly, with the size and existing market focus of the printer being perhaps the most significant factors. But it is certainly possible to say that some strategies stand a greater chance of success than others.

For a start, the transformation of printer into digital out-of-home media owner can be dismissed as missing the point: while it is true that the printer (particularly the one whose business is mostly local, or specific to a vertical) may have existing relationships with other businesses whose locations are promising sites for screens, and may have or be easily able to acquire relevant skills in content production and conversion, monetisation of the screens via advertising sales is so far from the printer’s business model that diversification into media ownership makes little sense.

Another less than optimum route from print into out-of-home, albeit one that has a little more going for it than media ownership, is the establishment of a separate, pure-play digital-signage business alongside but independent of the printer. Again, while the printer may well be able to bring skills and clients to the new business, a lack of close integration between paper and pixels means that the out-of-home operation has little added attraction to customers over and above the benefits offered by other digital-signage firms.

The route ahead for printers eyeing the digital out-of-home sector, then, is in offering services that are as integrated as possible, while of course retaining the option of complete separation for those clients who want digital signage only, or for whatever reason don’t want or aren’t able to align their on-screen communications with their printed ones.

The ways in which this integration might operate on an everyday basis are manifold, ranging from the strategic – advice on visual brand identity or on large-scale content management, for example – to the practical and technical: to cite just one possible instance, prior experience with the journey from screen to paper will make the printer’s prepress department extremely well-positioned to manage a coordinated approach to brand-specific colours across multiple media.

If printers are to move into digital out-of-home, how can the digital out-of-home supply side move itself toward servicing the printing industry? We’ve already touched on the possibility of printers with a storefront acting as sales channels for digital-sign-in-a-box-type products. But there are also other ways in which digital-signage software vendors, in particular, can make their products more adapted and attractive to the printer.

An obvious prerequisite is to view the printing sector as a partner rather than a rival: while it may be technically true that digital out-of-home is “competing” with print for businesses’ marketing and communications budgets, in practice the pot is so very large that there is far more to be gained by securing more customers for digital signage through cooperation with the printing industry than by responding to entirely theoretical competition.

Equally, it is important to recognise that most printing businesses will remain just that: those that are not already viewing themselves as integrated communications shops are unlikely to make that transformation simply because digital out-of-home appears on the scene. In other words, while it’s a potentially rewarding enhancement to their businesses, it’s not game-changing for the printers, and both the pitch and the reality must reflect this.

For example, the digital-signage software vendor who recognises the dominance of Adobe InDesign, QuarkXPress and PDF in the print-design field and makes their content-creation tools at least somewhat compatible with these will have the advantage over those who try to shoehorn printers into a world of MPEG or PowerPoint.

The mutual benefits to the two sectors can be summed up as enlarging the range of services that printers can profitably offer to their customers, and enlarging the client base for digital out-of-home – whether the clients are defined as end users (in a situation where a digital-signage firm is partnering with printers) or as the printers themselves (in the case of straightforward equipment and software sales).

The world will not be changed radically for either sector; but as smart printers showed with the arrival of online, they can leverage many of their competencies and contacts into new media, and as smart out-of-home vendors are fast discovering, the route ahead for the sector is often through imaginative partnerships.

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