Here's a riddle for you: what can look like molten metal, be applied to floors, and be written on and have magnets stuck to it? We'll give you a clue: not a digital billboard.

It is, of course, a piece of wide-format print. Electronic signage has inevitably made inroads into wide-format displays and advertising in recent years, but print is still proving to be irreplaceable in many situations. While a recent Epson 20/20 Vision survey found 40% of UK POS activity is currently delivered electronically, for example, it also predicted that print would still account for 39% of all POS activity by 2020.

PrintWeek spoke to two large print buyers to discover just what sorts of wide-format print is still going strong.

INTERCONTINENTAL HOTEL GROUP

The company
Intercontinental Hotel Group (IHG) is a global hotel company with nine different brands. These include household names Crowne Plaza, Holiday Inn and Holiday Inn Express. With more than 674,000 rooms in over 4,600 hotels in nearly 100 countries and territories around the world, the group has more guest rooms than any other hotel company. Print procurement is handled by Keelie Latham, print and fulfilment buyer, Global Procurement, and a colleague in the US. Both Latham and her colleague each work with a five-strong in-house print management team.

Print needs
The group’s print needs are as you might expect vast and varied. "It spans from room collateral – so branding on water bottles right through to ‘have you forgotten something?’ stickers in your bathroom – to marketing collateral such as DM, t-shirts and posters," says Latham.

On the wide-format side of things, the group’s most regular orders are for posters and banners to go in corporate offices, and for team-building posters for hotel back-office spaces. "We do anything from vinyl flooring to PVC banners, both interior and exterior," says Latham. "Particularly if we’re relaunching our Priority Club rewards initiative, we use these pieces to educate employees within the corporate office. So the message and graphics on the vinyl floor or banner might duplicate the flyers sent to clients. For example, we’ve just printed the reception area of the corporate office with details about our membership cards."

The printers
Latham, her US colleague, and their print management teams commission work to 1,100 printers across the globe. "We ideally like to print in-country; we want to do the right thing, we don’t want things being flown to different destinations," says Latham. "Where we don’t have the facility of wide-format printing we will use a neighbouring country."

On how printers can impress, Latham says: "If I’m looking for a unique product, that becomes a lot easier for the printer. But if I’m looking for a more general product, we would look for innovation; it can be the same piece of kit but they might be using it differently."

Latham adds that a web-to-print service is also a real ‘must’, as employees at various hotels across the world are encouraged to customise certain formats to advertise local events.

The challenges
It’s also important any printer working with IHG be very hot on customer service. "Customer service is our big challenge as printers will talk direct to the hotels, so we need a dedicated team purely for customer service," says Latham adding: "This doesn’t exclude small printers though; we have a range of printers."

Beyond this, the "sheer global nature" of the company is the biggest challenge, says Latham. The procurement team has to be mindful, she explains, that print is suitable for use in a wide range of environments. She cites the example of the team-building self-adhesive vinyl pieces featuring in hotel back-office spaces.

"These are large-format vinyl pieces bespoke to each property. They’ll have a map area where people can highlight where they come from and where they’ve been on holiday, and an area for them to attach photos and to feature employees of the month on," she says. "We worked with 3M to identify the ideal material; one that was magnetic and dry erase and also fire retardant. It also had to fit on every conceivable wall surface that we have in our properties, whether plaster board, breeze block, or wallpaper."

"Some of the hotels don’t necessarily belong to us; they’re franchised so we don’t hold information about the type of wall they have, so we have to find a product that will work with every wall," she continues. "Some of the hotels do the install themselves, so it has to be smaller panels because people aren’t necessarily used to managing three-foot-wide panels."

INTERMARKETING AGENCY

 
The company
Intermarketing Agency is a creative marketing agency based in Leeds, specialising in marketing, retail, advertising, digital, brand communications, video, print production, media, partnerships and social media. The company works with a wide range of sectors, from retail to travel, charities to financial service companies.

Print needs
The agency buys complete print solutions for clients, from branded promotional products to brochures, inserts and catalogues, through to personalised mailers and direct mail packs. Wide-format-wise, the products ordered are equally diverse. "We work across a huge variety of projects and therefore print requirements vary project by project from simple window clings to full building wraps," says Steve Sowden, managing partner at the company.

The printers
"The ability to work with the right suppliers on the right project is vital and we spend huge amounts of time finding the right partners," says Sowden, reporting that the firm has eight preferred suppliers in the UK and two in Ireland. He adds that it does outsource work to international printers, for some overseas Adidas and Ted Baker jobs, for example.

"We source printers by getting on the road and seeing them, by recommendations and by chance," says Sowden. Offering a particularly innovative format or solution can be a good ‘in’ for a printer, he adds, reporting: "We tend to have specific projects that open the doors for new suppliers who are then able to offer us a full range of printing and installation solutions."

But by far the most important quality for a prospective printer to offer is trustworthiness. "We have to be able to rely heavily on our suppliers – there are always times when we need a better price or an overnight turnaround and it’s the trust and relationships we build that give us the confidence that we can deliver and not let our clients down," says Sowden.

The challenges
Constantly coming up with formats that push the envelope is Intermarketing’s biggest challenge. "We need to constantly innovate and provide printed solutions to echo the innovative products that our clients are promoting," says Sowden. "Retail is a particularly tough and competitive market and we need to be able to convert our creative thoughts into practical and deliverable solutions. We also need our suppliers to bring ideas to us; new techniques, methods, materials. That can really give us the edge over our competition."

One example where one of Intermarketing’s UK printers was able to do just this, was in working with the company on a Olympics-themed Harrods window installation. The brief was to represent the Adidas brand, their products and the athletes that wear them across 16 individual windows.

The challenge here, reports Intermarketing, was that no one would be able to see the finished result until the windows were unveiled. So, with no second chance to tweak things, the company’s printers had to be highly responsive in translating Intermarketing’s vision into reality.

The brief was to turn the 2D visuals into large striking 3D displays without any visible fixings. This involved the printer suggesting an array of creative solutions, including glow in the dark materials, mirrorboard, printed mannequins and metal-effect panels. The Laura Trott window was a particular triumph, says Intermarketing. It featured four acrylic bikes offset and staggered, combining different materials, inks and opacities and varying percentages of white inks to achieve the effect of a blurred, high-speed cyclist.

Then there was the mascot window, which created the effect of molten metal liquid using mirrored acrylics, mirrors and additional acrylic overlays on eyes and bangles to create even more depth.
Intermarketing can never get enough of this kind of innovative approach to design briefs, says Sowden. "Sharing what they do well is always something printers could be doing more of," he says. "Great ideas are borne our of other great ideas and we need our suppliers to talk about and share what they are doing. Providing advice on new technologies, formats, materials and potential cost savings can prove invaluable to clients. Relationships can be cemented by providing our clients with an alternative solution to the brief that offers a new angle and a fresh approach. We aim to be at the forefront of advances in the print world and our suppliers hold the key to this knowledge."