“It’s important to address people in agencies and the media companies, as they are in their twenties and they are so used to electronic media that to them print is historic. There’s a tendency to use new media simply because it is new. They need to be made aware of its potential,” she says. “We don’t want to say new media is no good, we just want to put new media and print in the right balance.”

The belief that print needs to be actively promoted is growing on a global scale among a diverse range of people from across the supply chain. Klose is part of a loud chorus that believes new media and the internet have affected the demand for print – and will continue to do so unless something is done on an industry-wide level to address it.

For paper manufacturers, who have as much to lose as printers by the market’s decline, there is clear evidence of the impact of the internet.

“I made a presentation a couple of years ago to our members on the volume of paper shipments over the past 10 years,” says Frank Leerkotte, managing director of Cepifine, the European Association of Fine Paper Manufacturers. “After very good increases in the 1990s, there was only slow growth after 2000 and our members were asking why this was. It’s down to the rise of digital media, and that we weren’t doing anything to promote ourselves in the face of that.”

It’s not only a European phenomenon. In the US, an organisation has been set up with the sole purpose of promoting print.

“The Print Council is an interest group to promote the use of print as an effective communications medium. It came about when we saw that there was lots of coverage about new media but there was nothing to counter that about print and its effectiveness,” says The Print Council director Joanne Vinyard.

This autumn, Cepifine will launch its own solution to the print promotion puzzle, Print Sells. The campaign will run until the end of the year. The ambitious pan-European scheme covers 13 countries in Western Europe, including the UK, and aims to hit nearly half a million people involved in marketing, advertising and media buying during its run. The total investment will be about £3.5m (€5m).

Cepifine, while spearheading the campaign, has teamed up with other trade associations from across the print supply chain in Europe to make sure as many voices as possible are promoting print. Not only is it the first time anything so geographically ambitious has been attempted in Europe, it is also the first time the entire supply chain has got together, from the forest through print machinery and consumables suppliers, printers, postal services and direct mailers.

Cepifine’s Leerkotte believes this united front is essential. “Cepifine is only a small group, and if Print Sells was just some small guys shouting in the wilderness, it would never work. It’s fantastic that everyone in the supply chain has got behind it.”

Acknowledging that most high-quality print is produced to support the needs of businesses, to market and communicate their products and services, the target audience is people who decide on marketing spend and those who decide what media that money gets spent on. This has been broken down into three categories: marketing and communication managers in firms with more than 20 staff; account managers in advertising agencies with more than five staff; and media planners in media purchasing agencies.

Rather than promote print per se, the campaign considers the use of print from these marketing professionals’ perspectives and is split into four more tightly defined sectors that the audience understands. Those categories are direct mail, media, in-store and corporate communications. A PR campaign starts at the end of this month, and is followed by the launch of the Print Sells website at the beginning of October. These will then be followed up by press advertising in the media and marketing press in the 13 countries before targeted brochures that will be mailed in most countries, and run as inserts in the UK, are rolled out for each of the four categories, starting with direct mail in mid-October and finishing with corporate communications at the start of December.

Print Sells has a strapline: ‘Print. Your brand in their hands.’ It’s been chosen to emphasise the unique physical aspects of print, which provide a strong emotional pull.

Tactile medium
“What we want to communicate is that print is the most powerful medium and, compared to others, it is unique in providing touch and feel,” says Intergraf’s Klose. To that end, each of the mailings will be sent in a specially designed and printed envelope to increase the interest in the piece from the moment it hits target desks. The printed piece inside will feature various special effects that show off print’s physical and tactile strengths.

Last year the US’s Print Council launched its first campaign to promote print to the marketing community in America. Why Print?, a printed brochure highlighting print’s qualities, was rolled out at print trade show Graph Expo.

But appealing to the senses, and by extension the emotions, is only one half of the battle. Simply saying that print looks good and can do some things that grab the viewer’s attention is not enough to persuade marketers to use print; a more rational, factual approach is also needed.

Cepifine’s Leerkotte acknowledges that: “We’re targeting marketing and media decision makers, so we need to show facts and figures on effectiveness.”

Effectiveness is the key word. Measuring the response to a piece of marketing has always been important to the people with the purse strings who want to make sure that they are getting value for money. Historically the problem has been in measuring that effectiveness easily and cost-effectively.

At the heart of the question is the availability of tools that make it possible to track the effectiveness of communications. There is a pressure to extend the kind of efficiency expected in finance, manufacturing and logistics to marketing.

“A big part of the rise in internet marketing is because internet trackability is inherent,” says Pat Sorce, administrative chair of the school of print media at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), New York State, US. “It’s threatening every other media due to trackability.”

Sorce agrees that there needs to be more done to promote print as a medium: “Press coverage about the
media is dominated by online and new media. We need to get across the important facts about print’s effectiveness.

“If you look at the statistics for the growth of marketing media, then direct mail, customer magazines and magazine page advertising all show growth, but not the double-digit growth of new media. Print is still huge and has reasonable growth, and we want to remind people of that.”

Commercial potential
In the executive summary of her book, The Case for Print Media Advertising in the Internet Age, Sorce reports that one study of the top 100 US advertisers found higher correlations between a firm’s sales and its print advertising than broadcast (television and radio) advertising. Another study found that magazine adverts were more effective than television advertising in promoting sports utility vehicles (SUVs) over a 10-year period; another found that printed newspaper advertising generated a higher recognition of the content than the same ad online. Other research highlighted in the executive summary found that a combination of TV and direct mail produced the best sales for a food franchisor and a study of the most influential sources of information for purchasers found that after word of mouth and sales reps, print advertising was the most or second most effective influencer in a number of product categories.

The Print Council and RIT have jointly launched a website called Print in the Mix, which is described as ‘a clearinghouse of research on print media effectiveness’. The site summarises relevant research, providing links to the original source materials as well as providing bite-sized facts. Prior to the formal launch this month, some of The Print Council’s members have been testing the site and already their sales reps have started to use the materials in their presentations.

The aim is to make the site more comprehensive and to expand it to a global resource. “We’ve already got six American universities involved and we’ve sent out invitations to other international print media universities to join,” says The Print Council’s Vinyard.

RIT’s Sorce sees understanding data and a client’s communication needs as essential for printers who want to prosper.

Client communication
“When you’re bidding as a printer you’re at the last stage of the media buying process when all the planning has been done,” she says. “By then it’s just a commodity. If you get closer to the client you can ask more about what they want from the communication process. That demands that print sales people know a fair bit about media, advertising and campaigns – and a very important part of that is about under­standing data.”

She identifies data as a skill printers lack. “The level of understanding of data of most print firms is that they’re learning how to use a spreadsheet,” she says.

Part of the problem is that the message printers have heard about data for the last decade is about the use of variable data for personalisation, which is only a part of a wider issue.

“It is really about the whole perspective of data,” says Sorce. “It’s about qualifiable ideas and quantifiable information on the impact made by print. The printer has to be able to prove the effectiveness of the job they produced,” she says.

Closer to home, BPIF director of strategy Mike Hopkins says that helping BPIF members understand and use that data on print effectiveness is something it will play a bigger role in. In the meantime, the BPIF is getting behind Print Sells.

“We can see an advantage to our members,” he says. “We’ll be physically distributing the packs to our members and advising them on how to use them with customers. All of our externally facing staff have been trained up in Print Sells, and have it in their toolkit.” He describes the strategy as “a pincer movement, with our members coming up from below while the brochures from Cepifine come in from above.”

---

INDUSTRY ORGANISATION
Where to go for more tools to promote print

BPIF
www.britishprint.com
The BPIF is acting in the UK to co-ordinate the efforts of its members to promote themselves and Print Sells. It has provided input into the content and approach of Print Sells to make sure it is appropriate to the UK market. It will distribute hard copies of the Print Sells materials to its members and PDFs for them to print further copies for themselves to showcase their capabilities

Cepifine
www.cepifine.org
The European Association of Fine Paper Manufacturers was the instigator of the Print Sells campaign and is leading the initiative

Intergraf
www.intergraf.org
The International Confederation of Printing and Allied Industries. One of the partners in Print Sells. Intergraf is the umbrella trade body representing the different national print industry bodies, including the BPIF

Print in the Mix
http://printinthemix.rit.edu
This clearinghouse of research on print media effectiveness is run by the Rochester Institute of Technology’s Printing Industry Center and funded by The Print Council. It hosts research on print effectiveness available as summaries and bite-sized pieces of information for printers and print specifiers to use. It also has links with six other US universities and is aiming to add international members too

Print Sells
www.printsells.org
Once the website is up and running, it will host the information contained in the various Print Sells campaigns and resources relating to print effectiveness

The Print Council
www.theprintcouncil.org
This US organisation is promoting print through its Why Print? campaign as well as its involvement in Print in the mix. Why Print? is a brochure extolling print’s power that is available as a high-res download for printers to use freely to promote themselves