At the close of the HP users group conference in Tokyo, Keith Ferrel, co-founder of Cactus Imaging, was elected chairman of the Asia-Pacific Japan (APJ) division.
His election reinforces the increasing Australian influence over the group, with Melbourne –based Shadi Taleb heading the organising committee for this year’s conference. Mike Boyle new in the chair as HP’s vice president graphics confirmed the strategic sponsorship of Dscoop will be ongoing and supportive.
The two-day event at Big Sight Tokyo reinforced the collaborative nature of Dscoop with members providing more than half of the presenters and speakers. There were also guest speakers of calibre, notably Mark Gallagher senior manager of Formula 1 racing as well as the tireless Alon Bar-Shany, vice president Indigo Division, but the majority of presenters were members sharing their experiences and information with their colleagues and notional competitors.
This collegial style distinguishes Dscoop and is promoted as one of its greatest strengths. It reinforces the understanding that in this time of rapid disruptive change in the industry, the people who know most about what’s happening and how to capitalise on it are front-line industry members.
Speakers from the USA, Europe, Japan, India and Australia/New Zealand all opened up on how their businesses were dealing with change. With Taleb playing the role of host as well as interrogator, participants were able to get a 360-degree view of how the digital world is impacting on print.
This was less about the technology and more about adapting and educating the marketplace. Speaker after speaker returned to the theme that customers, and especially the marketing industry itself, are not up to speed with what digital printers can offer, that it’s up to the industry to lead the way.
Tales of company transformation were laced with rueful admissions of failures and mistakes. There is no one size fits all solution to adapting to the new technologies, which is why the personal accounts are so valuable.
People such as Jon Tolley, managing director of UK direct marketing business, Prime, told of how calibrating responses and combining channels for direct marketing transformed his business. With an increase of a single per cent in responses translating into $100,000 in extra revenue for clients, the value of mixing channels and combining technologies is obvious. He tells that some of his campaigns now achieve a quite staggering 52% response rate.
It was the proliferation of SKUs in the early part of the century that woke up Jay Dollreis, president of Ohio-based label company, ILS, to the need of investing in digital presses. Smaller print runs with different and more frequent package changes saw his company go through its own disruptive technology stage. He told of how in just one instance, the multi-million market for candles in the US had gone from using plain wrappers to being a major value-adding promotion with seasonal images and messages.
Every move you make
One of the most informative and transformative presentations came from Brendon Cook, managing director of Sydney-based publicly listed, oOH Media.
Focusing on the 10% per year growth of ‘out of home’ (OOH) advertising, he talked about how digital technology was disrupting and enabling growth of printed billboards. With 6% of all boards now digital, the $1 billion Australian OOH market is leading the world in tracking and measuring responses from everything from in-store interactive panels to massive digital signs that span highways.
As we are all becoming ever more traceable in our everyday life through the use of mobile phones, oOH Media is able to relay interactions with OOH ads in real time to clients. Indeed, Cook maintains that his business is a “location-based company. Out of home is about to become even more data rich as the technology develops,” he said.
Canvassing everything from the use of neuroscience to embed trigger memories to an ability to spot Porsche drivers on freeways and alter the billboard to suit, Cook’s presentation dramatically highlighted the impact of disruptive technology – the theme of Dscoop Asia.
Shadi Taleb summed up the value of this type of presentation at the closing ceremony on Monday afternoon when he told of an attendee approaching one of the speakers to question him further on points that were of special interest. “You can’t do that anywhere else,” said Taleb.
With Keith Ferrel closing the show in his new role of Chairman, he reiterated the call for more industry members to come forward as volunteers and engage with Dscoop. On the results of this conference, it will certainly prove to be worth their while.
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