However, it is clear that print’s future definitely includes online. It’s hard to argue against a future in which many sectors served by print, particularly in publishing and marketing, will need to co-exist with other media. This cross-media world will no doubt throw up many challenges – it already has – but there are also opportunities for printers to offer a broader range of communication tools, the choice of which will be driven by a need to combine the most appropriate methods of delivery in the dialogue with a customer or reader.

Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) chief executive Guy Phillipson says: Magazines and newspapers aren’t going to die but they do need to embrace online to reinvigorate their businesses. Phillipson points to the massive growth of UK online advertising revenues, which last year topped £2.8bn, eclipsing national newspaper spending. The IAB and PricewaterhouseCoopers predict that this year online revenues will top £3.5bn, and that in 2009 they will overtake TV as the biggest market with a £4bn spend. As media buyers change tack with their cheque books, publishers are following the money. It is thus only sensible that their own suppliers develop new business models that support customers’ online endeavours. Phillipson may have struck a note of discord in Committee Room 10 by proposing the debate’s motion, but he in fact supports a vision of harmony, saying that when print and online are combined and traffic is driven from one medium to another, the sum of the parts is much greater.

A new leaf
Printers may already have publishing knowledge; the question is how to transfer their skills to provide new profitable and useful services to their customers. For some, the answer lies with digital editions, which those in the know call page-turning software and detractors dub them flippin’ flippy things.

Short-run magazine specialist Pensord is definitely in the former camp. The Welsh printer recently signed a deal with software developer Yudu to offer customers a digital-edition service. Pensord managing director Tony Jones says: For publishers, it’s more and more difficult to survive on just a printed product. Our customers look at yearbooks, directories and exhibitions as additional sources of revenue; digital editions are just another way.

Used in the correct manner, you can build a stronger print base. Let’s say you’re looking to build subscriptions. Today, you may print and mail extra copies at extra cost. If you can send a digital edition, either in full or as a teaser, you can get an uptake at a very low cost.

Digital editions are certainly not without their critics. However, while some pundits can’t see the value, Jones believes it takes time for any new phenomenon to bed in before people understand its place in the media mix. It’s a bit like inkjet was at Drupa; it’s clear that it fits somewhere, but not quite where yet, he says.

It’s a more rounded service with a point of difference – it escapes the commodity trap. This was the most straightforward choice and the most exciting. Publishers are getting excited about it, especially using the statistics and data to be able to sharpen up a product. To encourage publishers to experiment with the service, Pensord is offering customers a free three-month trial. We want publishers to look at it, play with it and understand it and work out how they can profit from it, adds Jones.

Jones believes that printers are in a good position to provide this service. He estimates there are more than 60 firms offering some sort of digital-edition software, so finding the right supplier could be a potential challenge for publishers, who will welcome an offering from a trusted supplier. It’s also a natural companion to print production. Pensord’s workflow creates the digital edition automatically from the same supplied PDF file as the printed copies.

Among the 60 digital-edition suppliers is Ceros Media, part of Fresh Media Group (FMG). It is just one of several divisions that FMG has launched or acquired in a bid to safeguard its future; its core market of publishing pre-press, served by flagship Colour Systems, is being eroded by publishers bringing production in-house. FMG offers true cross-media, having added video production to its creative and online agency BigKid earlier this year through the acquisition of Guerrilla Productions.

FMG chief executive Simon Berg says: Four years ago, we were split 70/30 in favour of repro. Now it’s more like 40/60 and there are some areas of the new services that are vastly more profitable than repro. Entering those new markets was a challenge. We learnt the hard way, he adds. You need to be involved to look for the opportunities. I tend to pick something, get immersed in it, pull someone else in to help and once it’s nearly there, hire the experts. But he stresses you must have a structure in place to get the most out of time and effort you put in. I learned that I couldn’t be all over the entire business; you need managers.

Nick Dixon, chief executive at direct marketing specialist Howitt, echoes Berg: Before getting into cross-media, you need to understand your existing business. If you don’t have control of the core business, it can all come tumbling down while you’re trying to get into cross-media. My advice is proceed with caution.

Dixon is well placed to comment on what’s needed to become a cross-media player. Along with Howitt, he also heads up multi-channel marketing firm Dialogue Solutions and marketing agency Lateral Group, firms that span high-level marketing strategy, through cross-media to high-volume direct mail production. He believes that understanding your market can help identify which route to take into cross-media, and suggests that for some businesses, such as FMG, the creative services route is right, whereas for others, such as his own, it all comes down to data. There’s no right or wrong; it depends on the inherent strength of the brand, he adds.

If cross-media success can seem as difficult as a high-wire act, good data handling is the balancing pole to keep you on the tightrope. Firms that use data to drive their cross-media offering, such as Howitt, are wary of giving up any commercial advantage by sharing secrets with potential rivals. Dixon won’t be drawn on the details of dealing with data for fear of giving up his competitive edge.

Data aside, there’s a wealth of cross-media production tools on the market, such as long-term favourites XMPie and Pageflex. And as the area has grown, so too have the latest additions to the cross-media arsenal matured, with tools such as MindFire’s Look Who’s Clicking that can help plan and implement personalised campaigns with variable-data print, personalised websites (pURLs) and mobile messaging.

The big guns behind the desktop publishing systems that once revolutionised page creation and print are now driving forces behind the cross-media uprising. The once dominant Quark went to Drupa to prove it is far from defeated in the battle with rival Adobe. It used the exhibition to show off its Quark Dynamic Publishing Solution (DPS), billed as professional design meets automated multi-channel publishing, taking content from authoring tools, including Adobe InDesign, and repurposing them for print or electronic media. The genetic blueprint behind this content evolution is XML, or Extensible Mark-up Language. The data format streamlines what would otherwise be a complex undertaking, enabling you to create a single source where one change can update many documents, says the developer.

XML is also behind Adobe’s cross-media efforts within InDesign. However, the firm’s PDF format is not left behind in a cross-media world. Far from it – the vendor also used Drupa to launch the multimedia-friendly Acrobat 9. The product may have been somewhat overshadowed by the clamour over the firm’s other exhibition release, Adobe PDF Print Engine 2 with variable-data capabilities, but the new Acrobat was also a breakthrough, engineered for PDFs containing dynamic content such as video, audio and interactive elements in addition to static content required for print, such as images, fonts and colour-space information, all bound into one document.

Note of caution
Digital kit stalwarts are getting in on the action, too. At Drupa, Kodak was showing its Insite Campaign Manager, a piece of software that analyses and optimises all of a brand’s customer data. Kodak GCG Europe Enterprise Solutions marketing director Matthieu Bossan says: It’s about whether the data is correct. You can offer that before talking about production. Today, I don’t think that there is the infrastructure to do that. And if you don’t get the data and the segmentation right, it puts the entire campaign at risk.

Even suppliers sound a cautious note about moving in this direction. You need to be in the right mood. I wouldn’t take it to a commercial printer just looking at digital – you need variable-data print and web-to-print, says Bossan. But printers need a differentiated service to keep customers. They need to raise the bar.

Kodak isn’t alone in its focus – a flurry of activity in early July suggests this is set to be the latest hot topic. Liverpool-based marketing services provider CDMS revealed a tie-up with Apteco to integrate the Warwick-based software developer’s FastStats tool and offer marketing data analysis and insight. Tangent Communications has large corporate customer relationship marketing (CRM) business in its sights following a 50/50 joint venture, dubbed Zui, with SAP specialist De Villiers Walton.

While these are both high-end implementations targeting large corporate businesses, there will in time be a trickle-down effect as companies demand a data-driven approach to their marketing, which will inevitably mean a cross-media strategy.

The allure of future success against a backdrop of shrinking print volumes has put cross-media firmly on the agenda of many forward-thinking printers. The million-dollar question is not only how to provide a service that spans multiple media, but how to succeed by standing out from the crowd.

CASE STUDY: NICHE COMMUNICATIONS
Wokingham-based Niche grew from being a marketing company specialising in property customers into a full service firm offering everything from floor plans and photography to customer magazine publishing and print. During that evolution, it has also broadened its market beyond real estate to include insurance, leisure and IT.

According to digital print director Neil Bridgland, the firm’s move to cross-media at the start of this year with its Capsule8 offering was the natural next step after print.

We started in digital print with Xerox DocuColors and went for a web-to-print solution with Xralle three years ago, says Bridgland. Once we offered web-to-print, people started to ask about personalisation on top of short runs, and eight months ago personalisation pushed us into cross-media.

Clients were sending out mailers and hoping for a response by phone or post, but there was no way of measuring the response to that campaign. The personalised URL added the tools to track response rates.

It’s early days. We’ve been doing cross-media for eight months and we’ve only just started to get campaigns running in the past couple of months, he says. Clients have been wary as there are extra costs, but once they’ve done a campaign, they are very positive.

Bridgland is reluctant to provide full details about how it moved into cross-media, only to say it cost the firm in excess of £150,000 for hardware, software and training. We reckon we may be a year ahead of the competition and we want to keep that advantage before others buy into it. We’re in a market that’s going to get very competitive very soon.

CASE STUDY: FRESH MEDIA GROUP
In the two years since Fresh Media Group (FMG) launched e-zine platform Ceros, the product has gone from strength to strength with a range of consumer, business-to-business and customer titles now using the software. Customers include BBC Magazines, Bauer, Dennis, Emap, and Printing World’s publisher Haymarket. The software recently reached the landmark of serving 1.4m pages in a day.

The issue is how to monetise this, says FMG marketing director Dominic Duffy. It’s not the print edition; you can do different stuff with an online edition.

That different stuff includes adding video and sound to a layout that uses the familiar visual language and production techniques of a printed product. It’s similar enough to the print edition that readers are happy with the idea of coming across display pages and even spreads taking up their entire screen, which is something very compelling for publishers and advertisers alike.

You can get an ad across someone’s screen and they won’t object – how else can you do that on the web? It’s extremely compelling, claims FMG chief executive Simon Berg.

Ceros provides three different types of product: the basic print facsimile; the online only, such as the oft-cited Monkey from Dennis; and, the latest development, the hybrid edition.

The hybrid edition is derived from a printed magazine but formatted for the web, says Duffy. Online titles are inhaled – you need big bold spreads with only a little text.

Ceros has recently been used for Talksport’s launch of a digital edition. The radio station opted to launch a free magazine in an online-only format showing just how much the media landscape is evolving and the boundaries are blurring. Going from radio to the web, that’s going to be a challenge for [traditional] publishers, says Duffy.