There is a mantra sweeping the industry, “We’re not a print operation, we’re a communications operation.” Invoked as printers seek pole position on the value chain, and often used to describe proactively consulting with ad agencies and clients about what they need in a campaign. The old model of waiting reactively at the end of the chain for print orders is increasingly seen as a formula for decline. There’s not much profit in print crumbs that may randomly fall from what today is a large, multimedia table.
Printers plugging their services into the dynamic world of cross-media marketing are able to do so because they have promoted themselves as providers of variable-data print (VDP), the ability to personalise and version their output from information on a database.
As VDP is a technological term largely unheard of or misunderstood in the advertising and marketing domain – perhaps a surprise to some within the printing industry – what it can do for a campaign is a story every VDP provider needs to explain to potential stakeholders.
Database-driven print helps sell not-for-profit lottery tickets, as Melbourne’s Digital Logic can attest, it streamlines mailed packs, as ComputerShare Communication Services does, and it sharpens the retailer’s message in FlyBuys member statements by versioning them, a service Blue Star DM provides.
What these companies and others into VDP have in common is the ability to master data management – PURLs or URL landing pages, SMS, QR coding – at the B2B level, and to sell their understanding of multimedia campaigns, including the VDP component, to their clients and agencies. Some of the better ones can even show their clients how they can port it online for their end-customers in a web-to-print solution.
At Frontline Printing, a 30-year-old digital printer in Sydney’s Artarmon, VDP accounts for 70 per cent of business, says managing director Wayne Godsell. An increasing amount of it is for retailers seeking to bolster customer loyalty to their bricks-and-mortar, operations against growing competition from online sales.
Imagination is the only limit, Godsell tells ProPrint. Frontline, a compact outfit with 13 staff, now prints wide-format variable signage on 3mm timber, perspex and glass, using its Roland LEJ and VS machines and its Canon 8000. It has just completed an order for customised shopfront canvas awnings using a VDP component to vary the information displayed on the awning.
Much of the VDP is production work – plastic cards, A4 letters, labels and brochures – some of it ganged in wide-format, then cut to DL size. Some of it is for major events. Frontline prints passes for the V8 Supercar event in Tasmania. Some VDP is printed with invisible ink for blue-light security scanning. Jobs are printed on four Konica Minoltas (an A1000, 6500Ac, 6500 and a mono 1021) and two Océ machines (a 9000 and a mono 1210). They are finished in the digital bindery with two Morgana DigiFolds and a Major, a Polar and EBA guillotine, diecutters and a Heidelberg Platen.
Frontline uses Objectif Lune’s PrintShop Mail and PlanetPress, as well as LabelView label software. A data bureau in Melbourne dials Frontline’s computer nightly to download the VDP data. The software processes it and sends it to the Océ in job-sheet form, ready for the operator in the morning to view a menu of jobs for the presses. A job sheet and delivery docket are printed for each job.
Godsell says Frontline was always digital-only and launched into VDP some 25 years ago, printing pricetags for Big W. He recalls Big W phoning one day and asking if Frontline could print barcodes. In an era when the tiny zebra patches were just arriving on the scene, he gamely said yes, and after hanging up the phone, asked out loud: “What’s a barcode?” But Frontline soon launched itself into a new phase of its VDP operations.
“An increasing amount of work comes from the agencies putting together direct marketing campaigns. They don’t call it VDP but they know what they need for their clients and we can deliver it,” he says. The bulk of Frontline’s VDP work comes from established customer relationships and increasingly from its website, which attracts agency inquiries. Customers can order via W2P off its Qprint Pro MIS.
“You need the IT experiences to handle the databases, something a little foreign to most offset printers,” reflects Godsell. “A lot of offset and digital businesses outsource VDP to us. They either don’t have the software or they’re just scared of VDP.”
When Frontline initially brought in PlanetPress ten years ago, it paid several thousands of dollars to a programmer who customised it, an investment that has paid off handsomely.
“VDP allows you to establish a relationship with a customer,” says Godsell. “It’s an elaborate set-up between the customer and us, and if they’re happy, they’re not going to shop around on prices. VDP is either 100 per cent right or 100 per cent wrong. Customers can’t justify the risk of something going wrong because they have switched printers, so you get many repeat orders.”
Steve Ball, industry marketing manager, graphic communications, at Fuji Xerox Australia, says that although a key driver of VDP page volume, direct mail, is forecast to decline, the VDP market opportunity is forecast to rise over the next three years by 3.5 per cent compound annual growth. “Much of the DM in the market is still produced traditionally, meaning there is still significant opportunity for digital printers who are able to effectively sell and market the value they can create for their end-customers.
“A significant percentage of digital print providers have invested in VDP capability, that is, software, however a significant percentage do not use the products as designed, and therefore don’t unlock their value,” he asserts.
Ball says there might not be as many fully integrated trigger-based multi-channel campaigns with a VDP component as the top print houses might want. Agencies do not necessarily own the channel strategy for their clients. More often than not, this sits with the end customer. The channel or point of contact in the agency, the print buyer or specifier, ordinarily does not have any control of the communication or contact plans, so is not authorised to upsell the value that might be provided by a digital printer migrating their business to one of marketing services provider.
Darrell John, national workflow analyst at Konica Minolta Australia, believes the hype itself holds back greater adoption of VDP. “The hype tends to emphasise the one-to-one marketing style work with image personalisation and multichannel publishing. This can be highly profitable business, but requires strong marketing skills to execute well. Often I see great pieces of VDP-based printing using all the bells and whistles, but the most important part of the communication is lost – the message or the purpose for actually creating the communication. If the customer does not receive a significant take-up from the mail piece, they are going to be less inclined to repeat the process, given the extra effort in generating this style of work.”
John believes that for the VDP software to be most effective, it should actually be generated by the agencies, not the print vendors. “Traditionally vendors have targeted printers with VDP creation software. While this has provided the tools to print one-to-one marketing pieces, the actual creation and demand for this work needs to originate from the marketing and design agencies.”
He says VDP can be a growth sector for mail and trade houses, as long as they take control of the full communication cycle. “They need to recognise their business does not finish with the mail piece being lodged at Australia Post but they must continue to track the communication after it is delivered. True growth comes from measuring the success of the VDP work.”
Customising student information
VDP at sophisticated levels has been the focus at South Melbourne’s BPO Print, part of BPO (Business Process Outsourcing) Intelligence, which is an arm of The OCA Group, an Australian-based global company with offices in Australia, New Zealand, the United States, the United Kingdom and India.
OCA Group’s core business is helping educational institutions to recruit students while cutting the administrative burdens associated with the process, so freeing up resources. Each year OCA Group helps education providers around the world to recruit thousands of students to countries such as Australia, NZ and the UK. It does this by providing recruitment services, a one-stop shop for communications, printing, warehousing, fulfilment, distribution and software services.
OCA Group, based in Melbourne’s CBD, provides print production, warehousing and logistics, as well as software, to manage and market international and domestic campaigns through BPO Intelligence (part of OCA Group). Clients include Monash University, University of Technology Sydney, University of Queensland and educational providers in the US, UK and NZ.
But the company also offers a wide range of communications solutions to clients in the corporate and not-for-profit sectors.
BPO Print was created by OCA Group in March last year after it acquired the assets and staff of local print company Big Print Typo from businessman Graham Smorgon. Less than a year on, BPO Print director Mark Pettitt tells ProPrint the VDP business is progressing in leaps and bounds.
While BPO has offset services on Shinohara presses, it is two Xerox iGens – a 150 and a 1000 – are the workhorses behind its growing VDP printing and mailing. The iGens, integrated with Pitney Bowes finishing equipment, pump out the variable-print component of BPO Print’s new Easy Direct Marketing concept, explains Pettitt.
BPO is fast becoming a global operation with access to OCA Group’s international office network and through new suppliers in China. It also offers wide-format for banners and signage, and merchandising. The company was quick off the blocks after the print company was added to its operations, snaring two awards at the Australian Business Awards in July — for 'product excellence printing and logistics' and 'product value printing and logistics'.
“We don’t call it VDP, as that’s an industry term – rather, it’s part of our communications solution and that is how we market it to agencies and their clients,” states Pettitt. “Not all our multimedia packages involve print but we still believe in the power in print, which is extraordinarily emotive if it comes at the right time and in the right way. It’s something that can be held in your hands or lying nearby where you are often reminded of it, rather than it being locked away in an electronic device.”
Instead of starting with a blank slate, OCA Group was able to leverage its considerable IT software acumen via its BPO Intelligence division into high-grade VDP, says Pettitt, and integrate it into a multimedia mix comprising email, SMS, Personalised URL ‘landing pages’ (PURLs), even personalised video clips. He describes these services as “personalised and contextualised”, providing a seamless end-customer experience from first contact onwards, through various stages of a campaign. “We want to have a unique conversation with each of our clients that feels like its one-to-one.”
For example, the group has a client that meets students around the world for prospective placement. The client needs to send follow-ups which include types of course information that a particular student segment in a particular country has asked for. In turn, these are followed by hardcopy information packs sorted by course and country of origin. Both followups encourage that student segment to apply for placement. Essentially Easy Direct Marketing uses multiple channels to help more prospects from one stage to another, such as from a prospect to a client, from an expiring member to a renewal, and from a low-value donor to a high-value donor.
Pettitt says that coming to market with a strong IT, print and finishing capability has enabled BPO Print to respond to agency and corporate interest in convergent marketing campaigns. “Really the only challenge is for us to help them work out what they’re going to do with it.”
Comment below to have your say on this story.
If you have a news story or tip-off, get in touch at editorial@sprinter.com.au.
Sign up to the Sprinter newsletter
