The print job

By Eric Brooks

By empowering creative directors to do more of their work in-house, new printing technology enables them capture lucrative deals with short print runs and tight turnaround times. But the technology is only as good as the brains and strategy behind it.

Unlike everyone else who uses IT as an excuse to outsource their work, creative directors love it when technology enables them to do more of their work in-house. As Bruce Watt, Saatchi & Saatchi's Regional Creative Director explained, "Doing work in-house is the holy grail of every creative agency. Ideally, you want to do everything in-house, but cost gets in the way." Now, thanks to a new generation of cost-effective printing techniques, Stephen Russbrook, Creative Services Director at Oglivy & Mather stated that, "We've had to rethink the whole process and we're bringing a lot of production work that used to be outsourced in-house."

Printing technology is changing the dynamics of creative printing everywhere from small designers to multinational chains. As the cost of colour printing falls and digital printing catches up to offset print technology, the business model and relationships between creative directors, in-house staff, clients and professional printers are being redefined. 

Personalisation, Solutions & Smaller Print Runs

Moreover, even as vendors tout new printing technologies, they emphasise the overall solution, personalisation, and smaller scale economies they capture. Towards this end, Fuji Xerox stresses its Asia-wide network of Epicentre network of printing solutions providers while technologically strong Oki Data has rebranded itself as Oki Printing Solutions. 

Peter Lim, Oki's Singapore Business Manager confirmed that, "Oki has migrated upwards from leading edge printers to leading edge printing solutions." Similarly, Vincent Low, Marketing Manager for Fuji Xerox's printer division confirmed that, "We come from the angle of providing a complete customer solution." And just as new printing techniques allow for unprecedented customisation of collaterals, so too, our case studies will demonstrate how solutions are tailored to the unique characteristics of each player in the creative design chain.

This is because the creative leveraging of new printing solutions does not encompass any one particular printer size, technology or solution framework. Corporate printing, creative printing, the relationship between the two and printing houses are all affected. However, Oglivy & Mather's Russbrook elaborated that despite this revolution, the old hierarchy remains in place: "Laser and LED printers are for pre-proofing but for bill boards or high-end magazines, ink jets (say, Canon's W8400) are still king."

Digital Printing Shakes up Creatives, Print Firms

irge collatthat?!w generation of printing techniques, creatives everywhere are closer to Nirvana. ng technology, "rector at Ogl

Russbrook, however, noted that in printing press technology, a revolution of sorts is underway. "Digital printing was expensive when it came out but is now becoming much more competitive (relative to traditional offset printing)." Indeed, Russbrook reflected the consensus of contacted creative heads when he opined that "for large print runs, we still use lithographic printing but for short runs, we use digital printing." Indeed, a new generation of digital printing systems such as Canon's iGen3 or hp's Indigo is playing a critical role not only in the new aggressive stance of creative firms but also in the strategies of the printing firms they rely on.

Within creative firms, Buchoy Macasaet, Group Head Art Director, Publicis Singapore reported that design processes have been made more dynamic by a new generation of printers. He stated that, "Fuji-Xerox's (DocuColor 1256) speed and quality allows us to all types of mockups that we used to be only able to do during the finishing stage."

While many companies use personalisation to target individual consumers, this can also be done for large corporate clients. According to Macasaet, the DocuColor 1256 "can also be programmed to different requirements, depending on individual client needs. For example, a Straits Times creative would have different layout requirements than one from Berita Harian. All the newspapers have different requirements and you can program these into the printing job."

However, Publicis's Macasaet made it clear that this streamlining of work depended on the underlying solution configuration as much as on the technology itself. He explained that, "It was a long, careful process when we considered upgrading printers. We did it in consultation with Fuji Xerox's Epicentre, which helped us create a customised solution adapted to our creative needs." Hence, just as creatives must be customised to client needs, so too must printing solutions reflect the unique needs and business model of the creative company in question.

The flow, delegation and velocity of creative work are evolving far faster than the actual technology. The emerging creative business model encompasses everything from standard corporate printers to wide-body machines, personalising data mining software as much as clients and printing firms. Not only is the business model of creative agencies undergoing a metamorphosis, so is that of the printing firms they continue to rely on.

Case Study #1: Awesome Design Kitchen

Awesome Design Kitchen is an example of a dynamic, mid range agency that is using advances in print technology to redefine its relationship with clients. As Creative Director Marc Ling explained, "ADK is a print and web design company with both a creative and marketing side. So when we bought the Oki printer for a dual purpose. The creative department shares it with the sales side as well as the marketing department, which uses it to make direct marketing collaterals."

Speed, Low Cost Promotes Internal Sharing

In his decision to use an Oki printer for both ADK's internal printing and proof-of-concept collaterals, Ling explained that, "My company has three sales staff and three marketing people and its speed makes sharing an Oki easier than with slower models. We found that with our Oki printer, the cost of colour was the same as that of using black toner and this was a major consideration in our purchasing decision."

For in-house creative and corporate functions, Ling stressed the Oki 9800GA's low operating costs. "If you are talking about colour printing, an Oki is one of the less expensive printers to operate. An hp colour cartridge costs around $200 but Oki cartridges cost about $120, $70 in the case of monotone cartridges. However, the printer's speed, flexibility and low operating costs do not merely create for internal cost economies. Instead, the scope of ADK's business and its relationship with clients has been greatly expanded. "The flexibility of our Oki printer takes the function of printing out of the design equation so that we can just focus on being creative."

Printing Processes Internalised, Deeper Client Relationships

Ling explained that, "We do many short runs of customised collaterals. Now, every time we serve a different industry, we don't need to outsource and be forced to buy a minimum of 500 pieces. Previously, we outsourced most of the time and I had to burn (the collaterals onto) a CD, pass it to a printer on Bras Basah Road, wait an hour, order a minimum number of pieces and pay a premium price. Now however, we just do it ourselves and we don't have to print more pieces than what our client asked for. With an Oki machine, we can do printing in-house; otherwise we would still have to outsource it."

Ling emphasised his ability to make creative proofs internally lowers ADK's costs and profoundly decreases its turnaround time -- all while keeping more control over the entire creative process. Added Ling, "When I want to print, I don't have to call anyone and find out how long it will take them to do it. I can just do it in my office."

The control over turnaround time has also enabled ADK to enjoy deeper, more interactive relationships with its customers. According to Ling, "My clients used to have to wait to check their creative but with Oki's LED printer, it comes out fast. The Oki lets my client sit down with the creative director. It's very much to our client's advantage to come in and see my creative team, consult with them during its design in person, and so on. When we outsourced the printing of concepts, we were never able to do that. Consultation used to be done over the phone, after which we would outsource in order to print it up the proof-of-concept. The Oki printer's ability to do this in-house allows us to develop a deeper relationship with our clients."

Case Study #2: Saatchi & Saatchi, MTV & National Geographic

While the flexibility of new corporate printers empowers mid-size advertising firms, the big boys also leverage new printing technology. Often, it enables them to take on projects they could never profitably do before. In the case of advertising giant Saatchi & Saatchi, the rising speed and falling unit costs of short production runs enabled it to capture the business of an award winning photographer -- as well as win a design award of its own. In both instances, a mere twelve hours was required to accomplish what formerly took days.

Creative Director Watt explained how a new generation of printing technology made it possible for Saatchi & Saatchi to undertake two very high value, low volume jobs with a short turnaround time. "In the case of National Geographic, Mike Yamashita took the photos on an hp digital camera and we printed out every one of his photos in large, high quality prints on the DeskJet 130."

Watt explained that, "Turnaround time was the deciding factor. The hp DeskJet 130 made it possible for Saatchi & Saatchi to display Mike Yamashita's photos in the client's room where he could choose the ones he wanted within 24 hours.  With respect to 3D, depth and resolution, the quality was there on the screen but when we print them out in a normal A3 printer, they are just flat by comparison. The DeskJet 130 photos had very accurate details and skin colours. According to Watt, without the DeskJet 130's speed and 3D accuracy, manually evaluating Yamashita's photos or sending them to a printer would have taken too much time or money to make this print run economical.

Watt added that, "There was a cost factor and a time factor. Normally, this would have taken days, and we did it in an afternoon and evening. Cost savings and turnaround time were equally important." Watt made it clear that without the synthesis of quality and speed afforded by the DeskJet 130, Saatchi & Saatchi may not have been able to take on National Geographic's project with Mike Yamashita's photos.

However, what makes Saatchi & Saatchi's leveraging of printing technology unique is that it has systematised it to do a wide variety of short run, high value print jobs. This was again the case in Saatchi & Saatchi's print run at the 2004 MTV Asia Awards.

For this particular print run, it undertook both the production and publishing of 300 commemorative books for the MTV Asia Awards 2004 -- all within twelve hours.  Between 5 and 6pm on the night of the awards' night, photographers captured the MTV celebrities arriving at the red carpet.

At 7pm, while 7,000 spectators at Singapore Indoor Stadium and 150 million TV viewers watch the awards live, Saatchi & Saatchi's design team was downloading the digital photographs of contestants for immediate selection, strip-in and layout for the design of the 36-paged full-colour commemorative book.

By 8pm, pages were mostly completed and the design team printed out colour proofs using hp's Color LaserJet 9500, fine-tuning prints in conjunction with the Focoltone Intelligent Color Calibration System. Deviations from the photo's original colour were automatically captured and adjusted by the system, thereby saving hours of time that would be spent manually inspecting each individual photo. The possibility of human error associated with such processes was also mitigated.

Around 10pm, as the last of MTV Asia's 2004 awards ended, Saatchi & Saatchi's design team downloaded the final batch of photographs for immediate strip-in and layout. With the help of software, all the artwork was completed within two hours. 

Around midnight, a final round of colour proofs was printed using hp Color LaserJet 9500 for checking and signing off by both MTV Asia and hp. The design team packaged these proofs together with the hard disk of approved artwork files for hand-over to Saatchi & Saatchi's printer, A&P Coordinator. 

By 2am, the proofs and hard disk reached A&P Coordinator. Using an hp Indigo Digital Press 3000 that delivers up to six-colour offset-quality printing and hp's Personalisation software, 300 personalised photobooks were generated online in less than an hour.  With personalisation complete, design data was downloaded into the system for a test run. Test pages were checked against the colour-accurate proofs. 

Some time around 3am, hp Indigo Digital Press 3000 began printing rich, vibrant colour prints at 812 x 2400 dpi resolution and 180 lines per inch. Unlike the traditional offset printing system that prints in page-by-page batches, hp Indigo prints one whole book at one go, all while managing each book's collation and personalisation.  Five hours later around 8am, with printing completed, the pages and book covers were wire-bound and packed into specially designed PVC boxes.

By 11am, the first of the MTV Asia Awards 2004 commemorative books were delivered to the hotel rooms of 300 VIPs and journalists. Recipients were pleasantly surprised to see commemorative books with their own names printed within a carefully cut oval space on the front cover. As if to demonstrate that efficiency breeds creativity, Creative Director Watt reported that, "The book later won the American Graphic Design award 2005 for graphic design."

Case Study #3: JCS Digital Solutions

As both ADK's Saatchi & Saatchi's experience demonstrates, even though much more work is being done internally, the final printing of many creatives must still be outsourced to professional printers. Here too, we find that a sea change is underway. Digital printing machines offered by vendors such as Fuji Xerox iGen3 or hp's Indigo are catching up with traditional offset printing giants such as Heidelberg. While offset printing still has some advantages, printing companies are discovering that the synthesis of digital printing and software driven marketing can bear fruit.

By taking delivery of a Fuji Xerox iGen3 digital printing press in January 2005, Singapore's JCS Digital Solutions became the first firm in Southeast Asia to do so. By doing so, it has expanded its business model from short-run print jobs to lucrative, low volume creative projects with a fast turnaround time. Costing between $1.5 million and $1.8 million, the iGen3's cost represents a serious financial commitment on the part of any printer.

Always one to investigate before making a commitment, Joanna Boo, Managing Director and owner of JCS decided to purchase an iGen3 after meeting European and American printers who had successfully used it at a trade show held in Bonn last year. Their experiences implied that far from being expensive, digital printing now mitigates offset printing's greatest opportunity cost -- the inability to profitably undertake high-quality, short-run print runs at an economically reasonable unit cost or fast turnaround time.

In this respect, the iGen3 digital printing capabilities have transformed JCS' business model. Boo stated that the iGen3 "opened up new business avenues for us on a global scale". Approximately 95% of JCS' revenues now come from digital printing. Moreover, instead of being limited to time sensitive projects of intermediate quality, the iGen3's high-quality output also enables JCS to take on creative jobs too.

Boo explained that the iGen3's advanced digital printing capabilities "enables us to take on more interesting jobs. It is able to accept a very wide range of paper stock, even coated, glossy and textured. The quality of the colour rendering also enables us to produce demanding publications such as glossy fashion catalogues. And the iGen3 is very fast. At 100 pages per minute, I can generate over 1 million impressions in a month." Hence, the iGen3 enables JCS to make money on short print runs that cannot cover the fixed costs of its traditional offset printing rivals.

With everyone from event marketers to large advertising agencies relying on short print runs for an increasing proportion of their revenues, Boo explained that, "We address a niche in the market, providing services for print runs of up to 1,000 copies. These are perfectly good customers, but unfortunately have certain constraints that restrict them to printing too many copies at one time. Thus they are unable to get offset servicing at a cost effective price."

She explained that, "There will be times when offset printers receive a low print run job that they do not find economical to print. I welcome these requests with open arms. In return, I also pass along larger print run jobs to them. At the end of the day, everybody benefits, including the end-customer who enjoys a lower price."

Management, Strategy Matters More Than Ever

In all these cases, several facts are evident. While the technology affected everything from workhorse office printers to wide body machines and digital printing presses, there was a strong, underlying theme in all our case studies.

Superficially, an increasing internalisation of print work was made possible when short print runs were made both cost-effective and time-effective. This leads to new creative opportunities and an inevitable restructuring of the printing business itself, as offset printing makes way for a new generation of customised digital printing presses.

More importantly, in every one of our cases, new print technology was only leveraged when everything from internal processes to business models and client relationships were redesigned.  Saatchi & Saatchi's twelve hour turnaround time, ADK's better client relationships and JCS' new creative business clients depended on intelligent decision making as much as they did on new technology. Without strategy, shorter production runs, faster print times and lower unit costs would have remained mere technical abstractions. 

New business models, redesigned workflows were just as vital a factor in their success as investments in new printing techniques. Managerial coordination within the creative company, with clients and their designated printing houses all had to be undertaken before new opportunities could be profitably realised.

Ironically, it appears that leaps in printing technology are giving increasing weight to intangibles such as well-designed printing solutions, internal workflow, creativity or relationships between creatives and their clients. Hence, for creative agencies, clients and printing houses alike, the risk/reward curve has never been steeper. How ironic that those who create marketing collaterals must now embrace marketing strategy like never before.

Printer Buying Tips

There are no set rules for buying printers. A creative organisation's size, scale and business model determine the extent to which purchasing a particular class of printer is relevant.

For small companies, a rapid colour printer with low toner costs such as Oki's C9800GA A3 size printer is fast enough to be shared by admin and creative staff. Moreover, single pass LED or laser printers such as Oki's C9800GA, Fuji Xerox's DocuColor 1256 or Lexmark's C920 A3 printers are less prone to paper jams or breakdowns than traditional four pass printers, which have the disadvantage of more moving parts.

When a company is large scale enough to employ a wide-body, inkjet based printer, the unofficial consensus among contacted users was that Canon's line of wide body models were the most reliable.

However, for large scale print investments, the real question is, ‘what is the scale and scope of your creative department?' On one hand, the bigger it is, the more cost-effective it will be for you to invest in a customised print solution such as those offered by Fuji Xerox's Epicentre or digital printing systems such as the iGen3.

On the other hand, with printing costs in free fall, you must revisit this question every year to do an updated cost-benefit analysis. That way, you can bring in-house both new print functions and those creative design opportunities that accompany them at the most optimal time.

Collateral Personalisation & the Rise of Digital Printing Solutions

Within the sphere of printing technology, keep an eye on the evolution of digital printing presses such as hp's Indigo or Fuji Xerox's iGen3. Within this article, we've demonstrated how digital printing's rapid speed and rising quality were equally important to Saatchi & Saatchi as well as printing firms such as JCS Digital Solutions. According to Vincent Low, Marketing Manager for Fuji Xerox's printer division, "Printing presses such as Fuji Xerox's iGen3 allow digital printing houses to take on high-quality, low run print jobs that neither in-house creative departments nor traditional offset printers can do economically." Moreover, a well-designed digital printing solution offers creative agencies the opportunity to offer clients unprecedented personalisation of collaterals.

As Jeffrey Lim of Fuji-Xerox's Epicentre explained, "For example, a travel agency can change the colour picture and website for a personalised travel promotion DM. A website based on the person's travel habits is also designed, right down to the colours, promotional package details (e.g. Alaska vs. Tahiti, Beach photo vs. fishing photo), all customised on a highly personalised URL. We can generate a customised website for each personalised DM we send out." Traditional offset systems are incapable of personalising their marketing collaterals. As digital presses rise in quality, those who adopt them first will give traditional offset printers a run for their money.