Crossing Into Cross-Media

As more and more businesses expand their communication campaigns into beyond-print formats—like the Web, e-mail, e-books, and even PDAs and other wireless devices—forward-thinking printers are learning that crossing over into the realm of cross-media helps them retain customers as well as garner new clientele.

With a range of technological options available, turning a piece of print-ready content into an e-mail or a Web page isn't as labor-intensive as it might sound. In fact, even if they're not managing e-mail campaigns, many printers are involved in cross-media without even knowing it, says Frank Romano, the Roger K. Fawcett professor of digital publishing at the Rochester (N.Y.) Institute of Technology (RIT).

"About 60% of printers are involved in some level of cross-media," he observes. "Cross-media could be as simple as making PDFs for clients or as complex as maintaining a Web site for customers."

For printers, the true test of cross-media is whether they can transfer content from one medium to another with a minimum number of steps.

"The holy grail for cross-media is to have a centralized repository of data, and to have all these tools on the outside that are, in effect, rendering engines," explains John Parsons, director of marketing communications for CGS Publishing Technologies International.

The options for these "rendering engines"—from XML-based programs to customized Web-based systems—are many, and new technologies appear regularly. Regardless of the program used, the key for most printers' clients is maintaining consistency, notes Mary Lee Schneider, president of R.R. Donnelley's Premedia Technologies division. "Clients want to make sure their customers have a common experience, that their brand is represented in a consistent way regardless of medium," she notes.

There's no one right way to incorporate cross-media into a print shop's business plan. Some, like New York City-based Tanagraphics, Inc., have forged their own paths, using internal resources to develop programs that can offer clients cutting-edge digital services.

For example, more than four years ago, Tanagraphics' in-house engineers and program writers began developing their own suite of digital solutions, called Tana Interactive Publishing Systems (TI:PS). TI:PS offers Web browser-based access to clients, which include publishers, advertisers, and other businesses that need to keep track of, store, and repurpose images and content.

"A lot of designers are having to recreate content and images for multiple output streams," says Richard Krasner, vice president of sales for Tanagraphics. In addition to providing digital asset management capabilities, Krasner states that TI:PS allows users to transfer content among multiple platforms, creating PDF files for print, HTML for Web sites, and other formats.

He adds, "The integrity of the information is maintained across all different platforms, and that's what is so powerful about the technology."

While most printers tend to think of business strategy in terms of return on investment, Krasner says that Tanagraphics has gone one step beyond and shown how a cross-media plan not only can save money, but generate revenue in the long run.

For printers with more modest cross-media plans, however, it's not always necessary to reinvent the wheel. Tools like InDesign from Adobe Systems Incorporated also allow users to repurpose content efficiently. At RIT, students and faculty are enthusiastic about the page composition application's capabilities.

Within RIT's PUB group, a student-run organization that gives students a chance to gain hands-on experience with new media technologies, InDesign was the backbone of a project involving a directory listing of students, says PUB group president Mike Stern.

For the project, he explains, the group developed a dynamic form into which members could enter information on line. From there, the content could be quickly and efficiently repurposed for the Web, print, e-books, and Palm Pilots. "Using InDesign, we were able to streamline everything in XML, instead of having 60 pages of HTML," Stern notes.

Lightbulb Press, a print and Internet content developer based in New York City, relies on InDesign's cross-media capabilities for most of its products, explains Kenneth M. Morris, the company's founder and chief executive.

Says Morris, Lightbulb produces custom educational content with eye-catching graphics and layouts for corporate clients. Moving from QuarkXPress to InDesign allowed the company to repurpose existing files for various media without having to recreate detail-rich and graphics-heavy files, he explains.

"The heart of our business is content creation," Morris observes. "What Adobe has facilitated is the extensibility and the repurposing of this content."

Other tools, like Wave Corporation's MediaBank, allow users to store, access, and repurpose content as needed. Used by major publishers such as Reader's Digest as well as printing powerhouses like Donnelley, MediaBank allows users to store one version of an image or document, retrieve it easily from a database, and repurpose that content as needed, explains Geeter Kyrazis, Wave's director of business development.

Repurposing content for cross-media use often is more complicated than it may appear. A high-resolution image in CMYK format suitable for print, for instance, may require conversion to RGB for use on the Internet, Kyrazis explains. "One subset of our functionality is something called 'convert,' so you don't have to use Photoshop or some other client-based tool to switch between formats using the appropriate color space," he notes.

This combination of seamlessness and conversion capability makes MediaBank a good fit for Donnelley's Premedia Technologies division, Schneider contends. "A company with multiple needs, meaning that it has multiple images used multiple times across multiple channels, is the ideal customer from a cross-media perspective," she notes.

While using MediaBank to boost its asset management and cross-media capabilities, Donnelley has developed its own tools as well to serve customer needs. For example, while using MediaBank's color conversion function, Donnelley also builds color look-up tables for clients to ensure brand consistency in all output formats, from catalogs to large-format signs, and even Web campaigns.

If investing in a powerful asset management and cross-media tool is too ambitious right now, printers do have options.

One alternative is the WebToPrint application from MediaExpress, a Los Angeles-based technology services company that recently announced a strategic partnership with Wave's MediaBank, and whose clients include printers and publishers such as the Associated Press, Manassas, Va.-based Lake Lithograph Company, and The New York Times Company.

Says MediaExpress co-founder and chief technology officer Nicholas Seet, WebToPrint offers a common Web interface to accept information that can then be formatted in a variety of output streams, from print to digital. It can be used by clients on an ASP basis or as a fully integrated, in-house product.

"The key to doing customization of documents is good management of assets," Seet explains. "WebToPrint acts a bit like an information broker."