It's marketers and advertisers who need to be sold the digital print opportunity, writes Peter Coleman
Globally in mature and even some developing markets, newspaper circulations continue to fall, creating both reason and opportunity for more efficient ways of delivering the impact of print.
Yet the growing maturity of digital newspaper printing technology – a potential game-changer – is still on the backburner for many publishers.
It can be a hard-to-understand Pandora’s Box for those already struggling to keep abreast of the latest online and mobile developments. But nothing – as the plaque on my one-time sales manager’s office wall used to say – happens until someone sells something.
Put simply, it means that for vendors to succeed in what is acknowledged as a difficult digital newspaper market, the concept needs to capture the imagination of news media publishers and marketers, in the same way as it has become a no-brainer for book publishers and commercial printers.
Around the world, there are a growing number of publishing scenarios in which digital newspaper printing is the key enabling technology. And others in which it could drive a vital change.
One of the most ambitious is potentially a plan which could create a network of ten or 15 satellite digital print sites around Australia. We’re sure News Corp Australia’s Geoff Booth won’t mind us speculating on what they – or an enlightened contractor – might achieve.
At its basic level, a digital press mooted for Brisbane – halfway up Australia’s east coast – could print the 3000-5000 copies of the Herald-Sun News currently pays to have airlifted from Melbourne. For a start, they could have later news, but merging PDFs would enable those copies to have local weather, TV and entertainment content, with local Melbourne-only advertising replaced with Brisbane-centric alternatives. Not hard now that advertising units in News’ tabloids have been modularised.
And don’t stop at Queensland TV programmes, digital copies trucked into northern New South Wales (where time zones are different for half the year) could also have local programme detail and advertising… as could copies of the Brisbane Courier-Mail, other News tabloids and its national daily delivered to these markets.
And those of the country’s other major publishers such as Fairfax Media, APN and the smaller independents, certainly part of the market for a contractor. Elsewhere in the world, international editions for businesspeople and holidaymakers are the “bread and butter” of digital printers, and Australia’s sprawling geography means you could add interstate and regional dailies to the list offered to newsagents.
Which is where it all gets more interesting: The last few years have seen publishers taking control of relationships with readers (and about time!) to give them at least a fraction of the data they have on their online audience. While News gave up on its pilot T2020 project, a separation between subscriber and retail copies has given it and other publishers the opportunity to build delivery-focussed subscriber fulfillment businesses. (Interestingly in the UK, News has already started offering its home delivery capacity to other publishers.) All of which create potentially great locations for digital print equipment.
So too in Australia are the country’s many remote centres of population: In Alice Springs, where News closed down the modest offset plant which used to print the Centralian Advocate, the paper is now trucked the 16-hours from Darwin. For the daily Northern Territory News, it’s a choice between airlifting copies and taking a punt on whether they would still be wanted that long after publication.
Interestingly when discussing opportunities with GXpress – and perhaps thinking aloud – Booth mentions two cities, South Australia’s “seafood capital” of Port Lincoln and the mining centre of Mt Isa. Both are centres where the local publisher is Fairfax Media and News doesn’t have established titles, although it sells copies of its metro and regional dailies, printed seven-and-a-half and ten hours away, respectively.
Elsewhere, West Australian Newspapers’ Kalgoorlie Miner is printed in Perth, six-and-a-half hours from the mining city (which has a population of 30,000) where it is one of only two daily newspapers in the state. And copies of the Sydney Morning Herald read in Tenterfield and other northern NSW towns have made a tedious nine-hour, two-stage journey from suburban Sydney, arriving around lunchtime.
Herald publisher Fairfax Media has already moved to excise “unprofitable” print circulation – defined as copies that cost more to print and deliver than their cover price – and would no doubt justify the economics of this by arguing that the advertising they contain is largely irrelevant to readers in those areas, something digital print could fix. Publishing majors such as these have already conceded deadlines in favour of production cost savings, opting instead to deliver later news on mobiles and tablets.
And here is the paradox of the digitally-printed newspaper business model… each is unique in almost every circumstance. While Australia has relatively-high cover prices, a mix of big cities and remote small population centres, and well-paid readers, India can be almost the exact opposite – and the disparate nations of southeast Asia, everything in between. But even in these, digital print can fulfill a range of different roles.
No place for digital perhaps, in the burgeoning growth of native-language regional dailies because of very low cover prices and growing costs. ABP managing director and chief executive DD Purkayastha espoused a hyperlocal vision of “a newspaper for every electorate” in an address last year, but it’s hard to see a role for digital print here. A better prospect might be more affluent residential areas where there is an appetite for real estate, expensive cars and bling.
Which is where one of the newest projects – that being explored by Masar Print in Dubai comes in.
The Arab emirate – where broadsheet daily newspapers have expensive glossy covers – already has one digital newspaper plant, printing among other things, the latest news for the first and business class passengers of airlines such as Emirates. The Masar project promises something different: a newspaper refocussed by using preferences to eliminate the bits in which you are not interested, and add targetted content and advertising.
It’s all about demographics and net worth: A digital press can print a mixed batch of “exotic” newspaper titles for each destination or delivery run. In central Brisbane for example (or Hong Kong or Mumbai) that might include the Wall Street Journal (New York), Asahi Shimbun (Tokyo), China Daily (Beijing) and the Financial Times (London) alongside The Age and the Herald-Sun (Melbourne)… or whatever. They would be available immediately on publication, sometimes before availabilityin the source city.
There too, there is the opportunity to target readers with personalised print advertising. Publishers with print-and-digital readers are learning more and more about individuals, and there is the potential to connect online-gathered Big Data with subscriber lists.
Just as ad tech can pitch a gleaming new BMW online to an individual who has shown the slightest interest in owning one, digital printing can present him (or her) with the power of a newspaper advertisement tailored to their interest. And even get the model and colour right.
None of this is exactly new technology: in the early days of digital printing – close now to two decades ago – genetically-modified grain was new to market, and pioneer Novartis (now spun off into Syngenta) sent farmers carefully personalised mailing pieces to maximise response. Pictures reflected landscape familiar to them and the header in the shot would be green or red depending on whether you were a John Deere or a Massey Ferguson (or Case IH) kind of person. By 2000, they were sending out 200 different “versions” of a newsletter to a 62,000-name mailing list.
Prospects in those days would say they didn’t know the variable data technology was available, although importantly, an early effort was made to sell the concept to marketers with Indigo founder Benny Landa using bus sides in London’s adland in an attempt to turn his original E-Print brand into a verb.
But newspaper-capable digital print has been a long time coming, and marketers would say again that they didn’t know it was available. Which in many respects, it scarcely is, with relatively few newspaper-capable print sites around the world, and fewer still able to produce fully-personalised work.
Quality is at least equal to newspaper offset, and can be upgraded on some presses to produce glossy magazines. Cost appears to be still an issue, with users still concerned about installation and consumable (ink) costs, though these can be expected to fall as consumption and competition increases.
Rodd Winscott of Chicago’s Topweb observes that he “never believed there was such a thing as liquid gold” until he discovered the costly toner used by his two inkjet web presses.
What seems clear globally is that the digital print opportunity is best exploited with lots of localised sites to truly deliver the distribute-and-print model. And that to keep those machines busy requires cooperation between publishers… contractor or joint venture sites that print a portfolio of the partners’ and other work.
Working together, and capturing the imagination of marketers and publishers remain the prerequisites.
Personalised publishing starts here
There’s no doubt personalised print gets results, as direct mail companies know well. If you have the data to support it – and there are dozens of ways of gaining that – issue wraps can be the easiest way to start.
Although digital printing of complete newspapers can be hard to source from contractors, most mailing houses now have an inkjet web (or large sheetfed digital press) and could print a wrapper to be folded and collated around an offset-printed newspaper section.
These are two newspapers that got standout results for their efforts:
Main-Post, Würzburg, Germany
Data downloaded from the paper’s SAP system was merged with gender and geo-demographic data and massaged in Microsoft Excel before printing on the KBA-RotaJet inkjet web. The publisher also had access to clients’ previous tour bookings and preferences, producing a four-page wrapper with a personal welcome, side offers and other features including a prefilled reply postcard.
KBA’s Oliver Baar says the 3000-copy piece – which was collated with the main edition – drew a 70 per cent increase in responses and four times as many holiday orders as previous promotions. Three further trials have produced similar or better outcomes.
Daily News, Warwick, Australia
The wrap – featuring a holiday promotion – was printed on a Screen inkjet web press at Gold Coast marketing specialist Alphabet Publishing and collated with the offset-printed newspaper at the group’s Yandina print site. Drivers hand-delivered almost 600 subscriber copies while newsagents received a modified version for the rest of its 2700-copy circulation.
The result was a “huge response”, with one reader ever writing in to say thank-you. General manager for regional operations Gary Osborne says the group has been exploring opportunities created by current digital newspaper printing technology, and had visited some user sites with suppliers. “We’re looking at business models which would work in a small niche environment,” he says.
APN regional media editorial director Bryce John says competition entries from the persolanlised wrapper were “extremely high” at 21 per cent, with the response from the personalised copies four times higher than from retail buyers.
Enlightened users succeed with digital
The bread-and-butter of digital newspaper printing is in ‘static’ short-run work... frequently of international newspapers for expats and well-heeled travellers. These two European sites are also strong on personalised print... for themselves
and contract customers.
Kerk & Leven, Antwerp, Belgium
The newsletter – which also has a fundraising role for the church – has been running 500 local editions created by software which stitches multiple PDF layers together on-the-fly.
The newsletters switched to the ColorStream 3900 inkjet webs last year from production in two offset-printed sections – a 16-page main section printed on a manroland newspaper press and four pages of local content from a Drent narrow-web.
CSQ, Lombardy, Northern Italy
Digitally-printed sections contain hyperlocal editorial and advertising in runs of 500-2000 copies, and are virtually indistinguishable from the offset-printed paper.
Among CSQ’s customers is local daily Il Cittadino di Lodi which has responded to online competition with digitally-printed inserts including a full-colour what’s-on guide, Il Cittadino Eventi, pictured, credited with a 325 per cent boost in advertising revenue partly attributed to its higher-quality 80 gsm digital production. Like Halewijn in Belgian, CSQ also prints a fully-personalised weekly newsletter for a local catholic diocese.