MAPPING THE FUTURE
THE IPE X 2014 GUIDE TO THE FUTURE OF PRINT
EXCEL LONDON UK | 24-29 MARCH 2014 | ipex.org
CO-LOCATED WITH
INSIDE
04 Where we’re at and where we’re going Ellis Watson, CEO of DC Thomson Publishing, explains his vision for the future of print and how your company can thrive in this new age. 06 The numbers game Clive Humby, chief architect of the Tesco Clubcard and big data expert, explains how analysing your customers’ behaviour could transform your business. 08 The Ten Commandments of print marketing Rory Sutherland, Vice-Chairman of OgilvyOne London, explains what print can do to increase its presence in the hierarchy of marketing channels. 10 Where next? Futurologist Richard Watson explores what’s around the corner for print and what the industry can do to prepare itself. 12 Change is good Konica Minolta General Manager Olaf Lorenz flies the flag for revolution in the print industry. 14 The father of digital printing An exclusive interview with print visionary Benny Landa, Founder and CEO of the Landa Group. 16 All you need to know about Ipex 2014 Full details of the biggest English-language print event in the world, including eight key reasons why you should attend. 18 Contacts Everyone you need to know in the Ipex 2014 team, plus social media and details on how you can register for free.
Patrick Martell
PATRICK MARTELL WILL BE SPEAKING ON ‘THE ART OF CREATING NEW REVENUE STREAMS AND EXPLOITING NEW MARKETS’ AT THE WORLD PRINT SUMMIT ON TUESDAY 25 MARCH AT 11AM
There aren’t many who would disagree that the world is quickly turning digital. Consumers with more screens are demanding more content from more sources, connecting with each other and the rest of the world to share thoughts, opinions, recommendations and stories to gain instant feedback. So where does this leave print in this technology-driven world; a world where publishing, marketing, advertising and data services are more closely entwined? Print still has a vital role to play across all media industries – not as an individual channel, but as part of an integrated solution, where print and digital combine and thrive, each using the other’s strengths to engage with consumers in new and exciting ways. This is the future for print, and this exclusive publication aims to give a glimpse into that future, with some of the print and marketing industries’ leading experts offering their thoughts and opinions on where we’re heading and what you can do to capitalise on this rapidly developing media world. EXCEL LONDON UK | 24-29 MARCH 2014 | ipex.org
Whether it’s Rory Sutherland demanding the return of long-form copywriting or Richard Watson exploring the technologies of the future, all contributors agree that print has a healthy future ahead. All the qualities people love about it today will be the qualities people will love in ten years’ time – and beyond. All you have to do is continue to innovate, discover new skills and create new partnerships – which is where Ipex 2014 comes in. Ipex 2014 has been strategically developed to be the definitive information source for the latest print technologies and trends. With an extensive educational programme and over 500 international exhibitors, it will provide the world’s greatest forum for the print industry, giving you the inspiration and tools to drive your business towards an exciting future. I look forward to seeing you there. Patrick Martell, CEO of St Ives Group and President of Ipex 2014 03
THE FUTURE STARTS
NOW Ellis Watson, CEO of DC Thomson Publishing, bangs the drum for quality, talent and bravery in a print industry that has the potential to thrive for many years to come
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Print publishing is clearly challenged, and in net terms, it’s guaranteed to always get smaller, either by a little bit each year or quite a bit each year. Having said that, there is plenty of room for optimism if people can become more efficient, not only in how they buy, but also in how they print. People need to be brave. They need to be passionate and realise that there is potentially shedloads of money to be made and shedloads of opportunities out there if they just get better at doing their job. Keep investing, keep growing This realisation was at the forefront of our thinking when we spent £28m on new presses a couple of years ago, which will probably be the last investment of this
scale we will ever see in Europe. I joined DC Thomson the week that the company placed the order. Since then, we’ve turned three small print plants into one really big, efficient plant and put together a capability and quality of product that I’m delighted with. Thanks to this investment we’ve saved money and cut costs, but not on the things that delight readers. To delight readers you
Ellis Watson
need great content and an efficient and good-quality press. This is why you can’t cost-cut your way to growth, because if you cut in the wrong place, you’re jiggered. Be brave, be efficient and be good Unfortunately, when it comes to quality of content, printers are beholden to publishers, and they are never going to be able to change that. They can only make sure that the content is printed well, on budget and on time. However, if a printer can maintain the quality of work that they produce, be absolutely brilliant at client relationships and be ruthlessly efficient, with a cost base that’s as dynamically small as possible without compromising on quality, then they will have a future. But they must be brave. Clearly, the digital revolution has dramatically affected many aspects of print publishing and will continue to do so. But if we can do our jobs better and be a little bit braver, digital need not kill us. Take my daughter: she’s 16 years-old and will probably never habitually read a printed national newspaper every day, and nor will her children. But she loves print and she loves magazines, and I think there’s a good chance that her kids will love magazines if, as publishers, we can keep delighting and surprising them.
“ THERE IS SHEDLOADS OF MONEY TO BE MADE AND SHEDLOADS OF OPPORTUNITIES OUT THERE”
Embrace the digital revolution I’ve seen first-hand the effect that the digital revolution has had on other industries. I’ve run record labels when the digital revolution was completely exploding the music industry. I also ran television companies during the digital revolution that affected that industry. But those people who have approached the problem with the right attitude can still make good money out of music and they can still make good money out of television. You just need to apply the same attitude to publishing.
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We can’t protect yesterday and say that life was so much easier then, but we can still get a lot of the good bits that we enjoyed yesterday if we think very differently about tomorrow. There are plenty of examples of people who have already successfully applied this thinking in the record and television industries. I’m now trying to do the same for the publishing industry. Attitude, quality and talent That’s not to say that there won’t be challenges in the future. Innovation used to be the lifeblood of long-term growth in the publishing industry and sadly, we’re going to see less launches in the future – there are only one-fifth the number of launches happening today compared with eight years ago. As a result of statistics such as this, there are a lot of people out there who are saying that we’re basically making Betamax video recorders for a living. But that’s not the case at all. Yes, it’s a challenging time for our industry, but the quality of life we have now and in the future is so dependent upon our attitude, our quality and our talent. Magazine publishing is going to be a great industry to be in for at least the next 15 years, while newspaper printing is a pretty good industry to be in for the next 15 years. We just need people to be brave and decisive and focus on the quality and value of what they do. If they can do that then we’ll be fine.
ELLIS WATSON WILL BE SPEAKING ABOUT ‘HOW TO FUTURE-PROOF PRINT IN A DIGITAL AGE’ IN THE WORLD PRINT SUMMIT ON MONDAY 24 MARCH AT 2PM
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BIGDATA
“ ALLOWS MARKETERS TO BE ABLE TO UNDERSTAND THEIR CUSTOMERS’ MOODS AND MOTIVATIONS ON A DAILY BASIS”
C
live Humby is one of the world’s leading experts in analysing customer behaviour. As Chairman and co-founder of dunnhumby, he revolutionised data analysis and marketing strategy, propelling the Tesco Clubcard and segmentation programme to success. A Patron of the Market Research Society and Honorary Life Fellow of the Institute of Direct Marketing, Clive continues to work with blue chip clients, using data to discover the best way for brands to engage with their customers. How would you describe ‘big data’? Big data falls into two classes. The first just means you know a lot about customers for
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the first time. Historically, many organisations such as banks, insurance companies and travel companies only knew about their customers from a few transactions. They couldn’t really understand the customer other than the facts that they generated for the order. The people who really changed that were the supermarkets, when they started processing data on everything you bought. For the first time, we could understand how to analyse customer data that comes through on a constant basis. And because
Tesco Clubcard pioneer Clive Humby analyses the value in big data and how it can revolutionise brand marketing
that data is time-sensitive, it can show you people changing their minds or circumstances. The second form of big data is where the answer doesn’t lie in just one, but in multiple data sets. This way you can get a much better understanding of the customer. That’s really big data, because there’s no limit to what you can incorporate into that model. You could see the day when your health records, tax records, work records, social media records and many other records start to inform a whole series of strategies about how marketing might engage with people in a new way.
Clive Humby
What kind of impact has big data had on the marketing industry? The way marketing has changed the most is in gaining a new understanding of customers, to be able to understand their moods and motivations on a daily basis. If you take retailing as an example, you can now change the customer service experience using big data. The activity that Apple and Burberry are doing with iPads in their stores, they’re creating an interactive environment where the sales assistant can interact with the customer and use technology to have a more meaningful sales engagement. Are brands getting customer engagement right at the moment? Brands are still in push mode. They still want to push their messages out to consumers when it’s convenient to them, but that’s not what the consumer wants. They want more control of the dialogue. For example, I read my newspaper and my magazine on my tablet, but I still get the same ads as everyone else. No one’s going, ‘Well actually, I know you’re a bloke and I know you’re in the market for a new car. Rather than show you this ad for Wonga, I’ll show you ads for a new car.’ Part of the problem is that the advertising model is flawed. At the moment it goes to the highest bidder, not the most relevant. As a result of that, the consumer experience is getting worse rather than better. What should marketers be doing to make the best use of their data? The most important thing is to understand what data you’ve got and work out what it tells you. A lot of people fail to recognise that the data that’s collected is not the data you want, simply because it’s probably collected for a different reason. As an example, if you’re a magazine subscriber, the data that’s collected on you is about fulfilling your subscription, rather than your interest. I have half a dozen
“ USING MULTIPLE DATA SETS GIVES YOU A MUCH BETTER UNDERSTANDING OF THE CUSTOMER”
subscriptions to magazines, most of which I also engage with online. But there’s not been a single instance where people have used the fact that I tend to look at certain types of stories more or less. The second area is to think about what problems they want to solve for the customer. A lot of people start analysing data then say, ‘But I don’t know what to do with what I’ve found.’ That’s because they’ve not thought of it through the customer’s eyes. Is there still a place for print in the marketing mix? Oh definitely. The important thing about print is that it’s physical, and I don’t think you can underestimate its physical aspect. However, I do think the role of print is changing. It now has much more of a sharing role, giving you an ability to share content in a different way to digital. So the physicality of print, the digital
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reproduction of print, and the exclusively digital experience are three different things, and people need to work out what their digital print strategy is alongside their physical print strategy. For the physical version, you could have different adverts according to the subscriber. However, with the digital version, you have a greater degree of freedom to personalise the advertising according to who the reader is and where they are. Many content providers do this, such as The Economist and the BBC, but what they haven’t worked out is how they can customise content all the way through the value chain. What they’re doing is seeing digital and print as two different things, whereas I say they should be a continuum. So what can the print industry do to help itself? I’ve seen a number of experiments with tailored content using segmentation. As a result, certain pages are different for different people, giving you a selective binding process. When you deliver physical print, you can apply some of the principles of digital to the physical print process. The other thing is that where the consumer is buying the physical magazine, the publishers need to work out how their magazines become an important destination for the customer, understanding the important fact that their digital and their print footprints are actually complementary.
CLIVE HUMBY WILL BE SPEAKING ON THE SUBJECT OF ‘HARNESSING BIG DATA TO UNDERSTAND YOUR CUSTOMERS’ BEHAVIOUR’ AT THE WORLD PRINT SUMMIT ON THURSDAY 27 MARCH AT 11AM
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1 Print will lose its informational role
Rory Sutherland, ViceChairman of OgilvyOne London, steps up to deliver his sermon on the future of print marketing
THE TEN COMMANDMENTS OF PRINT
Using paper as the way to find simple factual information is going to diminish further. I don’t see any alternative to that. Your copy of the Yellow Pages is a lot thinner than it was 10 years ago and daily newspapers are also having a hard time. The use of print to get recent information is going to fall because 24-hour rolling news and the internet arguably do it better.
2 But it will be reinvented
When you get an external and exogenous disruption in any ecosystem, there are two things that can happen: something can die, and we ought to be candid about that – there aren’t many Hansom cabs around London anymore. But what quite often happens is that the thing becomes reinvented in a different form and starts to take on a new role. For example, people are using hyper-luxury direct mail, which will undoubtedly have a huge future. So you occupy different ecological niches and completely retire in others.
3 It should work with your TV
Reading and TV are surprisingly complementary activities, so there must be a way you can be reading a print magazine, see a reference for video content and have it play on your TV while you continue to read. Google Chromecast creates a symbiotic relationship between your TV and your tablet, so you could be reading an article online and you’re invited to watch a video. But instead of interrupting your article, you can bang the video up to your TV screen and carry on reading while it plays in the background. Get that to work with print and you’ll really have something.
4 Print effectiveness depends on context If you look at the way we interpret information, it’s much more subtle than, ‘Oh, that’s the message, I’ll take it on board literally and absorb it naively.’ A local pizza delivery firm dropping a flimsy
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Rory Sutherland
leaflet through your letterbox just feels right. Jeremy Bullmore has a wonderful example where he shows a handwritten sign that says, ‘Farm fresh eggs’. It’s written in chalk on a blackboard that’s left lying in a hedgerow with some attractive flowers. He then takes the same thing and writes ‘Flying Lessons’ on it, and the message then becomes completely inappropriate. That’s a really useful contextual experiment.
actually spent 60p deciding that you are particularly appropriate for this physical communication, versus receiving an email. The curse of email is the fact that it’s completely free so there’s no sense of flattery that you’ve been sent it.
9 For copy, go long
5 But how we interpret advertising is
still complex A very interesting fact is that in Eastern Europe under Communism, the act of advertising tended to depress sales. The reason was that if you’re in a scarce economy where most people will queue for the most basic things, the fact that you’re actually advertising something is an indicator of poor product quality. It suggests the thing is so bad that even in an economy plagued by scarcity, people don’t really want it. So the inference that consumers drew from that was that actually, this product’s rubbish.
“ THE COMPLETE DISAPPEARANCE OF LONG-COPY ADVERTISING IS AN EXTRAORDINARILY SIGNIFICANT PROBLEM FOR PRINT”
6 Efficiency doesn’t equal effectiveness
There’s a massive culture of efficiency in business today. That culture actually pats people on the back for cutting the cost of something without really asking the hard question about whether the value of what is obtained is actually commensurate. Everybody can stand up and get a little clap in front of their board of directors by saying, “I’ve cut costs 37% by moving our activities online.” That’s a message about efficiency, not about effectiveness.
7 Fashion is a large part of marketing
A key question in marketing is, ‘Where is print threatened for good reasons and where is it threatened because of fashion and whim?’ I would argue that the trend of everybody downloading their household utility bill rather than receiving them through the post has gone dangerously far.
When you have two or three bills you have to look at online, it’s actually quite nice. It’s a bit of a change, it’s quick. But when you’ve got 17 of those damn things, they start to become a serious pain in the arse.
8 Print is unfashionable – for now
There’s a current disequilibrium in the media environment, where print is disproportionately unfashionable, and it’s sometimes being eliminated when it needs to be reinvented. Over time, you could say it should normalise, because some clever people will come in and say, “Hold on a second, direct mail has suddenly become more effective because there’s less of it.” There’s a fundamental difference between being invited to apply for a Harrod’s card through the post, where someone’s
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The last time I enjoyed a piece of written copy was over 15 years ago. The complete disappearance of long-copy advertising is an extraordinarily significant problem for print. For some reason, agencies and clients don’t believe in words, but in large parts of the world, many people think verbally. So the fact that the advertising industry has become obsessively visual is a systemic problem which besets the print advertising industry. If you look at culture, rap is a highly verbal medium. The web, the blogosphere, is massively verbal. There’s loads of verbal culture going on but the ad industry doesn’t want to participate.
10 Forget the three-second attention span If there’s a problem with people’s attention, shouldn’t you try and hold it? The idea of an assumed short attention span is completely, ‘Oh, the locals have no shoes, there’s no opportunity here.’ On the contrary, if the locals have no shoes, there’s a big opportunity. Behavioural change sometimes takes a bit of time. Maybe it takes two minutes for you to re-think something, rather than three seconds.
RORY SUTHERLAND WILL BE SPEAKING ON THE SUBJECT OF ‘THE EVOLVING ROLE OF PRINT FOR CONSUMER MARKETING – CHANGING ATTITUDES TO PRINT’ IN THE WORLD PRINT SUMMIT ON WEDNESDAY 26 MARCH AT 11AM
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From 3D printing to nextgeneration internet, futurologist Richard Watson guides you through the top five top trends that will define the future of print
THE
SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME
3D printing My position on 3D printing is that it’s completely hyped and at the peak of its hype-cycle. There’s some fairly sophisticated stuff being done, but the hobbyist end of it is frankly a little ridiculous. I don’t see a world where it kills manufacturing and global logistics by any stretch of the imagination, and I don’t see every single home in 20 years’ time having a 3D printer. What I think is far more likely to happen is that people will tap into 3D print services, a development that will benefit print shops. So as well as printing out a bunch of colour copies, your local print shop will be able to
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make an object for you. A large amount of potential for 3D printing is also in industrial manufacturing, where people will print objects that are difficult to source. I just don’t see the need for everyone to own a 3D printer. But if you can visit someone who has the technology or mail some instructions to a company and have something mailed back, that would work. New materials There will be thousands, if not millions of new materials coming out over the next few decades, with entirely novel properties, and some of them could be really useful. At the moment, everyone’s talking about
Richard Watson
graphene, but I imagine, given six to twelve months, we’ll start talking about aerogels. Aerogels are almost light as air and the most perfect insulator known to man. This links into nanotechnology, where you can vary the properties of a material by millimetres. So you might have a bridge that has different physical properties every centimetre. Then there’s self-healing materials such as self-healing concrete, and fabrics and surfaces that can change colour on demand. One thing that’s more relevant to the print industry is the idea that, in theory, any flat surface can be a screen now – up to any size. And that could be quite revolutionary. So rather than printing posters, we just press ‘Send’ and any surface could be a giant screen. Now whether that’s a good idea or not is another matter, and an interesting debating point if you want to be surrounded by that much distraction. Paper versus screens Paper as a technology is actually far more sophisticated in so many ways than any screen we currently manufacture. So I don’t see screens replacing paper entirely. While screens have many downsides, paper’s got some extraordinary strengths, and we’re just starting to realise this. If you need to find something fast or share something, screens are pretty useful, but if you have a complex argument to make or you’re trying to get people to see the broader context, then paper is far better. Screens, particularly interactive screens, are full of distraction possibilities: you can Google a word and never go back to the original text; you can have an incoming email that you get distracted by. However, with e-paper, we’re going to have a hybrid between the two. We’re very close to foldable, rollable screens and I can see the situation where we have something that looks like paper but can play music or show you a film upon touch. The situation will start to get complicated very soon.
Augmented reality With Google Glass being rolled out this year, augmented reality will be very big. This brings with it the general blurring between virtual reality and real life. Many people cling onto the analogue world, but ten year-olds have either abandoned that world or never actually known it. Right now, I’m not sure how many average people will walk down the street wearing Google Glass. But if it does take off, it’ll change things quite significantly. We could be videoing absolutely all encounters with other people, so the police will probably have them as standard, as will anyone in public service. Overlaying information is another important application, so you could see crowdsourced reviews of a restaurant as you pass the building. Once we get into wearable computing, it does start changing things, particularly if computer-generated content is the main
“ WITH GOOGLE GLASS COMING OUT THIS YEAR, AUGMENTED REALITY WILL BE VERY BIG”
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thing we see. If walking down the street and seeing other people’s comments about places and things is the main way we encounter reality, that becomes a very different situation. Next-generation internet This taps into the current trend for the internet of things, where everything is connected – appliances, car, heating, everything. I see the internet becoming smarter and more sensory, an internet where you can touch things, smell things, feel things, potentially even taste things. An internet where browsers are more intelligent, able to tell the difference between Paris Hilton and Hilton Paris. Search will move towards a speech-based model, away from typing, which will mean that keyboards will increasingly disappear. Most of the time we’ll be texting instead of talking to each other. This, of course, has a downside, because you can’t get tonality in text and typing tends to be rushed, resulting in mistakes and missing things. But we’re moving away from typing instructions into a machine to talking to a machine and the machine talks back, as with the car manufacturers who are currently looking at voice-controlled cars. Of course, like all technology, some of these trends are very positive, but some are very worrying.
RICHARD WATSON WILL BE SPEAKING ON THE SUBJECT OF ‘FUTUREVISION – THE WORLD OF PRINT IN 2040’ IN THE WORLD PRINT SUMMIT ON FRIDAY 28 MARCH AT 3PM
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Konica Minolta General Manager Olaf Lorenz rings the changes as he heralds a new era of integration and innovation in the print arena
“IF YOU STICK TO YOUR OLD WAYS IT WILL BE DIFFICULT TO CHANGE ANYTHING”
s General Manager of Konica Minolta Business Solutions Europe GmbH, Olaf Lorenz has responsibility for the company’s international marketing division, supporting its development towards an IT and service-oriented business. Olaf is also a member of the company’s European management board, which includes a responsibility for the entire product lifecycle, from product planning through to launch. Is there a good feeling around the print industry at the moment? Yes. The industry is undergoing fast-moving change and creating new opportunities,
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with software and services becoming a major focus. From a document printing perspective, I am very confident that we will see more of the industry moving towards industrial printing. Even as the online retailers become more popular, they still need valuable packaging to deliver the products. So, yes, I feel very confident. What are the major developments that are going to transform the print industry? The B2 segment is an important sector for an inkjet device, and we will show our KM-1 at Ipex. This inkjet device will be a gamechanger to meet the requirements coming from the commercial printing
Olaf Lorenz
“ HAVING THE LINK OF PRINT AND DIGITAL MEDIA IS THE FUTURE OF PRINT”
market. The B2 size is a segment in which lots of other players would like to get into, and we believe we have found the ideal printing technology. One of the reasons for a customer to use our equipment is that it can work with less human touch. The KM-1 can do everything in one shot, all digitally, as well as being able to have the whole finishing capabilities in line. What work is Konica Minolta doing in the area of digital platforms? Last year we acquired Charterhouse, which is very popular in marketing management services. At Ipex we will be showing a full range of solutions, from workflow and marketing automation, web-to-print and publishing driving our print engines. It’s essential that commercial printers start to review multichannel communications, as the feedback that we’re getting from creative agencies is that they want to work collaboratively with printers to help them unlock the market potential in SMEs. Will people still need print for their news and entertainment in five years’ time? I am often asked about print, which has a bright future. However, it is clear that the considerable opportunities can only be fully realised through working as a community to offer solutions such as crossmedia for campaign management. IKEA did a very smart catalogue where they offered augmented reality. So they delivered the printed catalogue, but with an extra experience of using the tablet,
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for example, to change the colours of your bedroom furniture. To have that link between print and digital media is the future of print. Can you see that idea going further? Yes. Digital and print will be used increasingly in areas such as signage and billboards, in shops and supermarkets, for example. Increasingly, people will look at something on a digital screen, pick what they like and then print it, for instance, to use as a shopping list. That’s why I see a lot of complementary activities going hand in hand, rather than individual activities competing against each other. Is there anything else the print industry can do to help itself? If you stick to your old ways of doing business, it will be very difficult to change anything. That’s the best advice I can give: if you stay as you are, you will have a hard time in the future. Change is constant. Visit us on stand C130 at Ipex, where we will demonstrate all our capabilities. Customers can count on Konica Minolta for industryleading solutions to enable superior performance, efficiencies and increased profits. As a market leader in the supply of consultancy, technology and services to the commercial print and communications industry, Ipex forms a key part of our strategy to convey our messages and support the industry to adapt to change coming in from electronic media.
OLAF LORENZ WILL BE MODERATING THE PANEL DISCUSSION, ‘CAN PRINT CO-EXIST WITH DIGITAL COMMUNICATIONS IN THE FUTURE?’ IN THE WORLD PRINT SUMMIT ON TUESDAY 25 MARCH AT 12PM
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“EVERYONE UNDERSTANDS THAT THE PRINT INDUSTRY WILL BECOME ALL DIGITAL. IT’S ONLY A MATTER OF TIME AND THAT TIME IS ACCELERATING DRAMATICALLY” Benny Landa, Chairman and CEO of Landa Corporation and legendary father of digital printing, explains why technology is the saviour – not the nemesis – of the print industry Few people get to create one gamechanging technology in their lifetime, never mind two. But that’s exactly what Israeli inventor Benny Landa has achieved. At Ipex in 1993, Landa launched the world’s first digital offset colour printing press, the Indigo E-Print 1000. Twenty years later, he unveiled Nanography™ – a print process that involves ejecting Landa NanoInk™ onto a heated blanket belt, which dries and is then transferred to a substrate – and immediately took $1bn
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in orders. He is, in short, a legend of the print industry and key driver of its future. In terms of the health of the printing industry, where are we at the moment? The industry is full of paradoxes right now. Look at the press vendors, for example. From 2005-6, there’s been a steep decline in the value of all the vendors because they lost half their revenue in a five-year period, but then you’ve seen steep rises in the past year of all their stocks.
Benny Landa
It used to be the case that they were all doing the same thing, but now there are huge differences in how they behave and how the market perceives them, with some downsizing and instituting layoffs, and others thriving and making money. As a result, it’s very confusing for people who watch the industry from the outside. From the inside, if you look at it just from the contact that we have with customers and measure the sentiment that’s present within the industry, things are now very positive. People sense that the industry isn’t heading for this big nose-dive that everyone was so worried about and there’s a lot of optimism – especially about digital but also about the packaging industry, which continues to thrive. Do you think the traditional printing technologies will ever become obsolete? Ever is a long time. In the lifetime of anyone reading this, I don’t think we’re going to see any of the major printing technologies go away. Every technology has its sweet spot, as do the three leading printing technologies, offset, flexo and gravure. When you want very long run lengths at very high quality, gravure is the only way to go and nothing is going to challenge that for a very long time. Flexo, which fills the gap between offset and gravure, also has a sweet spot and I think it will also be around for a long time, as will offset. At the moment, only 2% of pages are printed digitally, so none of these technologies will be threatened in the short term in terms of existence. However, the market trend is clearly for shorter and shorter run lengths – especially in the internet and digital era where you have so much access to customer information. There’s more and more product differentiation, private labelling, private branding and personalisation, so there’s undoubtedly a tremendous amount of pressure in the marketplace.
“ THE PRINT INDUSTRY ISN’T HEADING FOR THIS BIG NOSE-DIVE THAT EVERYONE WAS SO WORRIED ABOUT AND THERE’S A LOT OF OPTIMISM”
What can printers do to convince marketers and advertisers that they should continue to use print? I don’t think they need to worry. When I meet people I don’t know and they ask me what I do for a living and I say ‘I’m in printing’, they look at me in a funny way and say, ‘Haven’t you heard of the iPad? Printing is dead. Printing is a thing of the past.’ What they are really referring to is books and newspapers, because that’s what most people relate to as printing. Of the $800bn value of printed goods sold annually, only about $80bn – 10% – is newspapers and books. When you look at the rest, that’s not going away at all. Even commercial printing is barely declining. It will be a very, very long time before brochures or printed flyers are replaced by digital media. Eventually it may get there, but it will be a very long time, and nothing is going to threaten packaging. So I don’t think printers have to do anything at all. It’s self-sustaining. When you launched the technology of digital printing, did you ever imagine it would become as big as it is today? I thought that it would be much bigger much faster. Take-up has been slower than I expected. I was quoted in 1993 predicting that by 2010, most printing would be digital, so I was way off. The statement is true in that most printing will be digital, but I was way off on the timing. I was
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overly optimistic believing that everyone would immediately embrace the benefits, but this industry is 600 years old and gigantic. It’s like a huge tanker – its momentum takes it a long way before it can make a significant turn. Having said that, digital is currently exploding and everyone understands it today, whereas when we first launched it, people were very sceptical. They’d never heard of it and didn’t get what it could ultimately do. Today, everyone understands that the industry will become all digital. It’s only a matter of time and that time is accelerating dramatically. What other innovations do you think will move print on in the future? Nothing is forever. There’s nothing more ephemeral than technology – here today, obsolete tomorrow. So there will always be additional print technologies and new technologies. Nanography is going to be around for a very long time, but there’s no doubt that this is not the end of the road. It would be foolish of anyone to think that when it comes to technology, we’ve hit the ultimate and it’s not going to be superseded by something else one day. I just think that ‘one day’ is many, many years away. Nanography is very robust and sustainable and is going to be the industry standard for printing for many, many years to come.
BENNY LANDA WILL PRESENT HIS KEYNOTE ‘PRINT: DOOMED OR ON THE VERGE OF A NEW DIGITAL RENAISSANCE’ IN THE WORLD PRINT SUMMIT ON TUESDAY 25 MARCH AT 2PM
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IPEX 2014
Ipex 2014 will be the first international print and marketing event that brings together the whole print and media supply chain. This exclusive event provides a vital opportunity to explore the latest print and communications tools and techniques for publishing and marketing campaigns. Manufacturers, printers, publishers, brand owners and agencies will all have the chance to debate, discover and develop inspirational campaigns, creative ideas and strategies, gathering together under one roof to discover the diversity of print and its leading role in the marketing mix.
FIVE EVENT AREAS, ONE FANTASTIC OPPORTUNITY 1. WORLD PRINT SUMMIT We’re pulling out all the stops to provide attendees with some of the world’s leading experts in print and media to discuss and debate where the worlds of print, marketing and publishing are heading, and how you can capitalise on their success.
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2. IPEX MASTERCLASSES Complementing the exhibits on the show floor and the World Print Summit, the Ipex Masterclasses will provide you with all the information, inspiration, tools and techniques you need to drive your business forward.
3. FUTURE INNOVATIONS Many print-based applications will be showcased on an island site on the Ipex 2014 floor, providing key insights into the process of how a product is created and giving a complete view of the seamless process from start to finish.
4. INSPIRATION AVENUE Celebrating the power of print media, the Central Boulevard of ExCeL London will be transformed into Inspiration Avenue, a stunning gallery of impact statements, stats and case studies that prove the effectiveness of print around the world.
5. ECO ZONE Sponsored by Komori, The Eco Zone tackles the issue of sustainability, showing how printers can adopt more sustainable methods and minimise environmental harm. With the environment moving further up the agenda of every sector, this is one area no print business can afford to ignore.
IPEX 2014
8 REASONS TO ATTEND IPEX 2014 CROSS MEDIA PRODUCTION
Joining Ipex 2014 for the first time, Cross Media Production will allow you to look beyond campaign planning and fully understand the building, managing and delivering of your communications across multiple platforms. The added value Cross Media Production gives to the Ipex 2014 event cannot be underestimated. It will give your business and brand the ideal opportunity to discover which innovative solutions exist to tie your campaigns together and how you can automate these processes and react instantly to the demands of your target audience. For more details go to www.cmpshow.com
1. Compare the products and services of around 500 global manufacturers and suppliers in one amazing, neutral place. 2. See live demonstrations of the latest technologies that are driving the print industry forward. 3. Gain insight and inspiration from the comprehensive content programme that will address the main issues that printers, publishers and marketers are facing today. 4. Receive access to exclusive content from industry experts on the trends and pitfalls shaping the industry. 5. Discover what the future of print holds in the Future Innovation Zone and experience the products and technologies that are set for rapid expansion over the next decade. 6. N etwork with printers, marketers, publishers and suppliers. 7. Understand the world of cross media and discover how to implement a successful multi-channel marketing campaign. 8. E xperience one of the world’s leading venues in one of its most exciting cities.
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FREE REGISTRATION
REGISTRATION FOR IPEX 2014 IS FREE AND TAKES JUST FIVE MINUTES. REGISTER NOW AND RECEIVE • A £30 saving on the door • Your exclusive Ipex 2014 newsletter • Free WiFi throughout the venue • Free exclusive show catalogue • The latest event news as it happens • New speakers and content as they are added to the programme Go to www.ipex.org/pre-reg to secure your place at the event for the world’s leading print and marketing professionals
EXCEL LONDON UK | 24-29 MARCH 2014 | ipex.org
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KEY CONTACTS
FOR SHOW INFORMATION OR GENERAL QUERIES, CALL THE IPEX HOTLINE ON 0845 218 7264 For enquiries about marketing, contact Angelina Stojsavljevic Group Marketing Manager +44 (0)203 377 3255 angelina.stojsavljevic@informa.com
Social media /IpexWorlds I pex 2014 @ipex_world Cross Media Production @cmpshow14
Sam Gunn Marketing Executive +44 (0)207 017 7020 sam.gunn@informa.com For enquiries for Cross Media Production, contact Andrew Thornhill Marketing Manager +44 (0)207 017 6949 andrew.thornhill@informa.com
I pex 2014 linkd.in/1amLwTy Cross Media Production linkd.in/1h8X7Ej /ipexworldtv www.ipex.org
For enquiries about sales, contact Wayne Beckett Sales Director +44 (0)203 377 3940 wayne.beckett@informa.com Mary Buck Sales Manager +44 (0)207 017 4038 mary.buck@informa.com For enquiries about PR, contact Elni Stofberg AD Communications +44 (0)1372 460 537 estofberg@adcomms.co.uk
EXCEL LONDON UK | 24-29 MARCH 2014 | ipex.org
About Informa Informa are the largest publicly owned organiser of exhibitions, events and training in the world, providing inspiring marketplaces and the opportunity for knowledge to be shared. With 8,000 employees working in 150 offices in over 40 countries, our global reach and breadth of offer is unique.
4th Floor, Maple House 149 Tottenham Court Road London W1T 7AD www.informa.com ‘Mapping The Future’ was produced by Soul Content www.soulcontent.co.uk