Buyers share their print perspectives

30 August 2013

People

You don't often get a group of print buyers from a range of disciplines together in the same room, but that's exactly what happened after the judging session for the PrintWeek Awards quality categories last month.

So we thought we would ask a selection of judges, panel by panel, what their biggest challenges are, how printers can help them and what still gets them excited about print.

PACKAGING & POS PANEL

Darryl Danielli: What do you think are the biggest challenges facing buyers at the moment?

Peter Stead Budgets – it’s as simple as that. They’re not increasing, but clients are still expecting campaigns to get bigger and better in terms of quantity and quality. That’s a massive generalisation I know, but overall it’s the most common challenge.

Claire Deacy That’s probably true, but there are technical challenges too. More and more often, we’re utilising multiple printing processes across the same campaign and colour management is becoming increasingly important as a result. Years ago, everything probably would have been produced on the same press, screen or maybe litho. Of course now we have a much wider choice, more options, more flexibility, but with that come challenges and complexity when it comes to press passing. I don’t think that all printers are necessarily where they need to be colour management-wise. To be fair that may because the technology they’re using is new, or we’re asking them to step out of their comfort zone in terms of what the technology is capable of. It’s also difficult for the suppliers because we’re getting pushed on price internally, which means that we have to push our regular suppliers or perhaps even use alternative suppliers that may be keener on price, but perhaps not so great on quality and we have to try and help them.

But isn’t that the price you pay? I mean that printers have been pushed so hard on price that sometimes something has to give?

Gregory Bentley That’s probably true. In my world, one of the biggest challenges is finding a compromise on supplier selection typically driven by cost and supplier selection based on their ability to support our innovations. We’ve all been pushing our suppliers for years to focus on efficiencies, but then we also need those same suppliers to, on occasion, turn on the innovation part of their business, and the support to enable them to do that needs to come from us too.

You mean find ways to work with suppliers to slim costs, without destroying margins?

GB Absolutely, but I’m not sure everyone works that collaboratively and that’s something that the print and buying communities could do better.

Charlotte Raphael-Graham That’s true, but then some do. We work very closely with our suppliers, all the way from the design stage – we have to. It means that we can make small compromises early on that, hopefully, benefit everyone. Not just in terms of expensive finishes or extras, but even on simple things like ensuring designs can be ganged efficiently to reduce waste.

What’s the one thing that printers can do better to help you and them though?

CRG Give us their expertise. If we have a good supplier relationship with our printers then they share their expertise with us. It’s not about just selling to us, although that does come into it. It’s about helping us to be better, and those suppliers that are the most collaborative tend to be the ones that have the most success with us.

PS I completely agree. If a printer could in some way step into a buyer’s shoes, they would really benefit. For example, when it comes to providing quotes, all too often they’re full of jargon and this can be off-putting. It’s little things like that that can help to breed openness.

CD Show us things too, there’s nothing better than being shown a great example of something that we can then take back to the marketing or creative teams – if we can then get them excited about something, it’s good news for us and also the printer. Sometimes printers can be a little too passive and wait for us to come to them with challenges – we like to be shown challenging projects.

DIRECT MAIL PANEL

What are the biggest challenges facing DM buyers?

Paul Dykes Maintaining effective cost control.

Cedric Clarke I agree. All too often the best we can hope for is that our stakeholders’ budgets remain the same. But even then, they’re being asked to do more with what they have. Of course, there are other ways we can look at things that don’t just involve us pushing for keen prices. Perhaps we can look at longer lead times as a result of better planning, for example.

PD However you do it though, delivering those savings is getting harder because there’s only one thing that consistently costs us more and that’s postage. And in the world of direct mail, that’s most often the single biggest unit cost and it’s inevitable that this is going to impact on volumes.

Lee Rhodes It is becoming a massive problem, because depending on the complexity of the mail pack it can be as much as 45%-50% of the total cost.

PD On the simple, but really big runs it can be as much as 75% of the total cost.

What are your views on Royal Mail privatisation then?

LR I think Moya Greene has done an excellent job on convincing the government to take on the pension deficit. If you look at the pure economics of the business, I’m not sure that Royal Mail would still be here in a few years if it had carried on the way it had been – but the concern is how privatisation is going to impact us. I met with Royal Mail recently and they seemed to be saying all the right things in terms of pushing DM and tailor-made-incentives (TMIs).

PD The jury is out for me though. We need stabilisation on pricing, but in some respects my bigger worry is that there is a new generation of marketers coming through that don’t really appreciate DM and have written off print and are just focused on digital channels.

How close are you to your marketing teams then?

CC We’re already very close to our marketing teams in many instances, certainly much closer than we were. That said, I don’t think they always appreciate that we’re there to help them. We could still get involved much earlier in the creative process and help them to achieve an ever better ROI, the same goes with getting them to work closer with our suppliers. We’re certainly working much better together, but I think there’s a lot more we could all do.

What could your suppliers do better then?

CC I would like them to not just look at the one solution they can provide, but perhaps look at all the range of alternative solutions they can provide. I want our suppliers to come to us with ideas about how we can do things better, smarter. I look for strategic partnerships and perhaps we can learn from things that their other customers do, I’m open to that – we can all learn from others.

PD I agree, we also need to challenge each other. I worry that a lot of creative agencies don’t have the print expertise they used to, which means that they’re not pushing print suppliers and then the danger is that we end up in a pool of ever-decreasing creativity – and that’s bad for all of us, printers, buyers and marketers.

LR There’s definitely a fear of innovation. People don’t like taking chances anymore, whether that’s a result of the present climate or an obsession with hitting targets and playing it safe, I don’t know, but we need to start taking chances and looking at adding value. To be fair, I’m not sure that printers are the problem; Paul’s right, it seems to be the agencies.

MARCOMMS PANEL

What’s the biggest challenge facing you?

Weldon Molony Internal resource is one of the key ones, but then that’s probably the same in whatever area you work in. Budgets are another, of course – they’re stagnant or shrinking and that means people focus on playing it safe. In truth, we should really be pushing innovation to generate an even better ROI. Instead we play it safe and opt for more of the same. Or worse: less of the same. Marketing departments are not testing anything, they’re not trying anything new – we recommend, as buyers, new executions, but generally everyone seems to be too risk-averse and that’s quite sad.

Kay Heather I agree. Budget and resource issues mean that people are afraid to take risks and, I guess, can’t really afford to.

WM That’s why it was great to be part of the judging today: it proves that the wow factor still exists.

It’s good to hear that print still excites you; what can printers do more to help you?

WM That’s a tough one, because to be honest I’m not sure I would want to be a printer at the moment, so I’m not really sure it’s fair of us to expect more. It’s the age-old problem of them having to invest in faster, better kit and then having to fill the extra capacity it generates. Then people like us have less work to help them fill it, and then you add to that more people chasing that diminishing work. It’s not necessarily driving prices down generally, but I’m sure if you wanted to push it, someone would offer a lower price.

But no one wants printing to become a commodity market, so how can printers stop that from happening?

WM I suppose printers could work harder at keeping hold of their best customers. It shouldn’t just be about the lowest quote; I want to work with the sort of printer whose minder will stop the press because he thinks something might be wrong with artwork and flag it up with the account manager.

KH I agree; you can always get a cheaper price if you have to – but it’s things like that that make a supplier really stand out. It’s about working with someone I can trust, who cares as much as I do.

WM That’s exactly it. That’s what keeps a supplier at the top of my list: proving that they care about what they do and don’t just pretend that they care.

BOOKS & CATALOGUES PANEL

What’s the biggest challenge facing you as buyers?

Lisa Moore Because of the type of books I concentrate on, kids’ books, they’re mainly produced in China, so my biggest challenge, strangely, is pricing. Simply because labour costs are going up so rapidly, it’s even getting to the point that we sometimes struggle to find suppliers if the title is too complex and needs too much handwork. So I guess the biggest challenge is the conflict between the price point parents are prepared to pay and how much children’s books cost to produce.

Matthew Willis In the catalogue market, getting a competitive price is not really a problem – but I can see a point in the not too distant future when it might be, if the consolidation continues. But our print runs are coming down, and that’s a challenge.

Jane Hyne Books are still a tough market in the UK. A lot of what is staying here is becoming more specialised, small print runs with beautiful finishes: books that people will buy and pay well for. But I think the big volumes are going elsewhere and not necessarily to be printed.

Dan Jones Perhaps that’s the way that the market has to go to an extent though. Trade black-and-white work moves on to things like Kindle, but the iPad’s not going to bite into the full-colour market. I can’t see Taschen moving from print to digital. I do find it frustrating that people think there are no manufacturing costs involved in digital though. There are – just look at the massive investments publishers have made in digital infrastructure.

Obviously digital media is having a big impact on both the book and catalogue sectors, but does this also represent an opportunity for you or just a threat?

DJ Possibly both, but we still don’t seem to have nailed the piracy issue. We seem to be just ignoring it, because it’s not a problem right now. It does sometimes feel that we haven’t learned the lessons from the music industry.

LM Then there are things like Amazon’s ‘lending library’ and how that’s going to impact us. In many ways we have challenges coming at us from all directions. Then there’s the problem of having to produce digital editions in all sorts of different formats. Things will get standardised, but we’re just not there yet.

MW I think it does represent a serious opportunity too though. We’re using augmented reality via Blippar and there are a 120-plus pages in our latest catalogue that are ‘Blippable’. Print is increasingly becoming a way into the internet for our customers and our marketing teams recognise that.

DJ I can see that, and I also think it will represent a serious opportunity when our smartphones get a bit smarter and penetrate a larger group of consumers.

PUBLICATIONS PANEL

What’s the biggest challenge facing you as buyers?

Matt Jolly Instability in the market. Especially when you’re placing work contractually and you’re sometimes having to second-guess which horse to back and if they are still going to be there in a few years. In short, there’s probably not as much visibility as we’d like; there’s a lot of smoke and mirrors when it comes to the numbers.

Mal Skelton For me it has probably been the contraction – the reduction in competition in the market. We’ve lost a lot of historic names, where suppliers have either gone out of business or have been bought, and as a result we’re fishing in a smaller pool, and that element of competition just doesn’t seem to be there anymore. I don’t just mean in print either, it’s the same in paper. And that is all quite worrying.

MJ Absolutely. As a buyer, we don’t want to be in the position that we’re buying in a market controlled by a duopoly.

But isn’t that the consequence of buyers making hay while the sun shines?

MJ We can’t absolve ourselves of responsibility, that’s true. But at the end of the day we don’t force the price on anyone – the market sets the price.

MS And also I think some suppliers have made some wrong moves in terms of their investment strategies and how they ran their businesses and they’re only now starting to sort that out in terms of increasing efficiencies and productivity. For a long time they were an inefficient group.

But then that gets back to sustainable pricing.

MS As buyers, it’s in our interests that the supply base is healthy and profitable and capable of delivering the services that we need. We have been spoilt for a number of years by the prices offered in the market and enjoyed very competitive rates. I’m old enough to remember a time when prices used to go up on a regular basis and in those days it was tough as a buyer. Now, the expectation is that the prices will go down. That said, it is beginning to change a bit now.

Angela Derbyshire You’re right about pricing and supplier choice, but postage is another major area of concern. I think the sale of Royal Mail is really going to challenge all publishers: we’ve got no idea what’s going to happen, but we can only assume that it will result in higher pricing sooner rather than later.

MJ That’s true, and the price of postage has already increased exponentially over the past few years. That’s probably had the biggest impact on run lengths. Paper is generally cyclical, but postage has only been going one way.

But have these challenges been driving innovation or stifling it? And isn’t it fair to say that publishers have created just as many problems?

MS Perhaps. I’m probably biased, but it does seem that we’re too focused on digital. As publishers, our creative energy has been focused on digital applications, but I think that’s starting to change as we’re starting to realise that print is still the prime revenue generator. Don’t get me wrong, digital can be an exciting adventure, but it can be scary too – and I’m just not sure we’ve got the balance right yet.

MJ I completely agree. Yes, the world is changing, but print still has an important role and I sometimes think that we publishers forget that.

AD We’re still learning. Everyone’s in a rush to develop apps, but there’s still no effective advertising model in many instances. The print advertising model does work.

What still excites you about working in print?

MS It’s still the people. Yes, there are challenges, but it’s certainly never boring. Don’t forget, we produce a product that is completely different every week or every month and it’s a product that people really connect with.

MJ It’s creative and inspiring and we get to do it often, we don’t just develop a product once and then sell it for years to come – once we’ve finished one product we start all over again and work hard to make the next even better than the last. It doesn’t get much better than that.

AWARDS CEREMONY

Tickets are now available for the PrintWeek Awards at the Grosvenor House, Park Lane, London on Monday 21 October

For more information, visit www.printweekawards.com or contact Edward Wyre on 020 7501 6742 or Edward.wyre@markallengroup.com

THE JUDGES QUOTED

Gregory Bentley Packaging innovator, Coca-Cola

Cedric Clarke Head of marketing procurement – print, paper & post, Tesco

Claire Deacy Purchasing manager, POS & merchandising, L’Oréal UK & Ireland

Angela Derbyshire Production director, Progressive Customer Publishing

Paul Dykes Head of print, production and data quality, Aimia

Kay Heather Print production co-ordinator, Imperial War Museums

Jane Hyne Production manager, National Gallery Company

Matt Jolly Production director, John Brown Media