First Australian meeting for Colour Print Exchange

Salmat represents Australia at international gathering of digital printers in Sydney this week.

It’s been a big week for the global focus on Australia with US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in town, but another international event took place beneath the radar of public scrutiny.

 

What is arguably the most high-powered group of international digital printers to visit Australia assembled at Sydney’s Sir Stamford Hotel this week for an intensive three-day conference forseeing the next ten years of variable data digital production, security printing, social and marketing trends, direct mail and transactional – promotional print.

 

Known as the CPX Group, it is an exclusive club, restricted to one large company per country with Australia’s Salmat organising and hosting the first CPX gathering in the Southern Hemisphere. Print21online – publishers also of Direct Magazine – gained sole media access, with deputy publisher Heidi McCourt (pictured below) together with Will Weeks, social media marketing manager for Contiki Travel, putting themselves in the “lion’s den” to answer questions relating to how Generation ‘Y’ feels about paper-based statements and other media trends.

 

Pictured: Print21's Heidi McCourt and social media marketing manager, Will Weeks give their views on Gen Y and paper-based communication.

Countries represented included Japan, Thailand, USA, UK, France, Spain, Israel and Finland. The world’s largest producer of personalized direct mail and statements – DST Outputs – was the American representative.

 

Topics discussed are not for general release but, together with the ‘Gen Y’ forum, Professor of Marketing at the University of Western Sydney, Dr Hugh Pattison also presented a compelling study on forward-looking likely media trends and scenarios up to 2020.

 

Salmat also organised customer perspectives from senior executives from Optus, Energy Australia and the National Bank of Australia, followed by a lively Q&A session of what major statement producers expect and forsee over the next decade. Colour print and targeted personalisation figured prominently in this session.

Pictured: James Duffy of Optus presenting.

Print21 columnist and industry consultant Andy McCourt delivered a technology and state of the economy update, and revealed that the genesis of the HP Indigo ‘Electro-ink’ process was right here in Australia, with the work and patents of Adelaide’s Kenneth A Metcalfe in the 1950s who developed liquid electrostatic ink for the Defense Department to use in producing maps. Indigo founder Benny Landa acknowledged this in a 1999 interview with McCourt.

 

He moved on to Memjet, developed here by Silverbrook Research and posed the question, ‘will this be the next big thing in inkjet?’

 

For so many presidents of the world’s major variable data printing companies to meet in Sydney is indeed an honour. Senior overseas executives of leading technology companies also flew in for presentations – all quietly and under the radar.

 

For Salmat, this is indeed a welcome achievement and has certainly improved international understanding and cooperation on high volume digital printing and variable data.