NOTEBOOK: Reasons To Be Happy: Printers Are Gaining Internet Mastery

One way analysts identify trends that will impact business is by trolling around news sources. Recurring reports of similar stripes—say, rising interest in environmental issues, scrapbooking, self-publishing—and voila, you've identified a trend that could impact your business plans. This also forms a part of the process we use at Graphic Arts Monthly for gathering news to present online and through our e-GAM electronic newsletter.

Catching our eye recently was a report from Dublin-based Research & Markets on the U.S. printing industry, which notes: “Non-print media, such as the Internet, is not a threat but rather an opportunity.... Savvy operators have the opportunity to move up the value chain, such as into document process outsourcing, involving the delegation to a supplier of any task or process in the document life cycle, from creation through delivery; and diversify from traditional print products into cross-media products, such as multimedia layout and design.”

The competitive edge, say these analysts, “belongs to consolidated operators who are better able to raise funds for investment, locate production in low-cost regions, accrue economies of scale and offer a more diverse range of value-added services.” They also note global print initiatives will be more difficult “at a time when barriers to entry will rise and relationships with customers will become more strategic and complex.”

With our ears to the wires, two tightly related notes we've heard resonating: a flurry of sophisticated movements among printers to embrace Internet usage; and a retooling of print centers to deliver rapid response services. Some recent examples:

G Advertising, a Los Angeles agency, is opening a print unit in Las Vegas this month. The company says it sees an advantage for Internet-linked ordering from its own print operation because local agencies there currently work only with third-party print vendors. The online print ordering system, printwithg.com, is key to the move.

Another report, from Stillwater, MN, tells of Docucopies' reaction to non-Microsoft Web viewers: It retooled its Website. “More and more Web surfers are turning to applications like Mozilla Firefox and Safari to browse the Internet,” says marketing director Jeff Corbo. “We want our services to be just as accessible to these people.”

We divine several things from this: that a Minnesota printer is savvy enough to have a marketing manager, hip enough to retool its site to be more compatible with browsers on the rise in popularity and spunky enough to spin that into news geared to raise its “findability” on Google.

At Michigan print giant Valassis, we read of the just-launched RedPlum, an online consumer coupon product linked to its print offerings. It relies primarily on Valassis' own ad vehicles—free-standing inserts, polybags, direct mail—and is centered around a Web portal, redplum.com, where ads are searchable and coupons are downloadable.

The move puts the company in competition with coupon giant ValPak and Web couponers CoolSavings.com and coupon.com. The RedPlum portfolio will reach 90% of U.S. households—100 million consumers.

And finally, Chicago-based start-up Arroweye Solutions is cashing in on the personalized gift card boom. It adds its own spin: a customized greeting card to accompany that gift card. The firm hosts and fulfills the online sale of gift cards for 22 retailers integrated to the customized greeting cards through its Cardways.com unit.

Consumers upload photos to be placed on the gift cards, which are printed and mailed with any of 3,000 cards from partner American Greetings. Production is in Henderson, NV.

As these and other stories in this issue affirm, there is boundless opportunity here. But to take advantage of it, printers have got to adopt new operating methods, and new tools, to go get it.