You’ve lost that loving feline: Print 21 magazine article

With the first putative signs of economic recovery come hopes that the printing industry will once again bounce back as usual and simply pick up where it left off. Dream on, says Andy McCourt, who argues that the recent downturn has changed the rules of the game completely and that, for many printers, any pick-up in activity is likely to be limp and lifeless.

In this mercurial world in which we live there are few certainties, but it does appear that the economic carnage of the past year is bottoming out. For Australia anyway.

It’s been truly awful in both financial and human cost terms. For printing and related industries, the casualties are still being counted as we wander through the still-smouldering wreckage, but we need no convincing that hundreds, perhaps thousands, of good skilled tradespeople have been tossed out of work and companies closed.

But the printing industry always tracks the health of the wider business community, right? When business in general is doing well, they buy print; when things are down, we’re a bit down too. While this has held true in past recession/recovery cycles, I hold grave fears for those print businesses who are unprepared for the brave new world around the corner.

Cat on the rebound
Globally, the printing industry has been haemorrhaging businesses since the turn of the millennium. Indeed, one company that secured a good slice of millennial printing – that of the official Sydney 2000 Olympics programme (Diamond Press) – didn’t even last the year out. Official US statistics put the number of businesses lost to the printing industry at almost 4,000 (-10.2 per cent) between 2002 and 2007, with another 3,000 establishments expected to be gone by 2010. In Australia, you only have to look around to see we’ve probably lost about the same or higher percentage of print businesses.

But the stand-out figure in the latest US Department of Commerce Economic Census is that, while commercial printing establishments were down 10.2 per cent, those calling themselves ‘Digital Printing’ establishments were up 118.6 per cent over the same five year period. For these digital businesses, the cat didn’t even die and it’s set to bounce higher and higher.

One reason why I fear a dead cat bounce for the majority of non-digital printing is the massive shifting of advertising dollars from traditional media to online and interactive methods. This means that when the ‘J’ curve swings up economically, and the advertising dollars start pouring back in, ordinary printing will be missing out on vast dollops of the gravy.

Marketing’s pushmi-pullyu
A lady by the name of Shar Van Boskirk from the respected tech and business firm, Forrester Research, in their ‘Interactive Marketing Forecast 2009 to 2014’ calls it the “cannibalisation of traditional media.” She maintains that while advertising budgets will decline, marketing investments will not and interactive marketing will account for 21 per cent of all marketing dollars spent by 2014. Note that word ‘interactive’. This is where traditional print falls down – it is a ‘push’ medium. You push messages and information in front of people and hope a certain percentage of them respond. Interactive marketing via websites, social media, mobile phones, email and so forth is a ‘pull’ media that draws participants into your world, opens dialogue and enables commercial messages to flutter through like butterflies.

But the reality is, print is only a ‘push’ medium because we in the industry perceive it to be and sell it as such. For some marketing, print’s permanence and unchangeability is an advantage – retail catalogues for example. In the time/space equation, sitting down with a good book or great glossy magazine provides an experience that indeed borders on the interactive – if the content is riveting and engages the reader on a deep level. For education, all research points to books being superior to screens for learning retention.

But, no matter how much better fixed printed information presents, looks and feels, it is not until it fuses the interactive forces of digital data management that it really starts to fly. To quote Van Boskirk again: “Agencies that can’t transition from pushing out messages to nurturing customer connections aren’t long for this world. Services firms that lack data management, analytics, listening, social media execution, and strategy expertise will dry up.”

Dry up or refuse to bounce back?

Nurturing types
The irony is that printed information holds the potential to be superlative at ‘nurturing customer connections’. You probably have a wallet full of printed customer connections with your credit, loyalty and membership cards. The tactile, permanent and trusted nature of print, when coupled with data-driven content targeted at the individual or group of individuals, is a winning combination and, as every marketing type loves to hear, is trackable and measurable.

Conflicts aside, 2010 promises to be a blockbuster year economically. It should be spring after a long cold winter, peace after a horrible war, family reunion after separation and the cry of a baby after a hard labour. But for printers to reap their full potential benefits, they must never expect things to return to ‘the way they were’ and must seize the digital day in both data management and variable digital output. Sure, things will improve even for traditional print but why just sip the milk and leave the cream behind?
Cats have nine lives, so they say, and printing may have used up a couple already. We need to turn the print cat into ‘Supercat’, the cross-media, data-driven, all-singing and dancing medium known as Print 2.0.

If we don’t, it might not just be a dead cat bounce coming up but, to coin the title of a Loudon Wainwright ditty, another 'Dead Skunk Lying in the Road'.