Digital printing gets big push from PMA - Photo Marketing Association

DSN Retailing Today, Nov 24, 2003

For all the talk of promoting how to print from digital images, the follow-through from the photo industry has been sporadic and limited to individual companies. Now, the industry finally has an advocate putting some money where their mouth is.

The Photo Marketing Association (PMA) is launching an industry-wide consumer and retailer education program to promote digital printing through consumers. "According to recent PMA research, the No. 1 reason among consumers for taking pictures with digital cameras is to preserve memories, but it's not a true memory unless it becomes an easily shared print," said Ted Fox, PMA's executive director. "As an industry, we

need to make this process simple and we need to educate consumers about their options for making high-quality prints from digital files and that's what this program is designed to do."

Digital camera sales continue to grow, and consumers' transition to the technology is taking a bite out of film sales and processing at retail. While there are lots of ways to get quality prints from images, the options are many and often so confusing for consumers that they opt to just do nothing; a worrisome proposition for this industry.

Then at PMA's fall meeting in September, a group of approximately 60 industry leaders--film manufacturers and retailers from the discount, specialty and drug store channel--met to discuss the issue. "To see what can we do as an industry to promote printing," said Gary Pageau, association publisher at the PMA. "But the reality is, we aren't the dairy association or Agribusiness. We can't fund a [huge] effort as an industry, so we are pursuing more of a public relations approach."

The approach is two-pronged, targeting both retailer and consumer.

On the retail side, the association has developed a Web site, admaker.pma.org, where retailers can access and download materials that can be used for advertising or in-store signage, or as a basis for more individualized media. "We're giving them the creative and they can put their tag line on it," said Pageau. "We are trying to provide retail support, let them do their own things, but give them some tools that they can use and maybe add their own creative spin to it."

PMA is also introducing the Qualified Digital Processing Center program (QDPC), "It's a logo that the retailers can use to identify that they do digital printing on-site," said Pageau. "It can be a kiosk, inkjet or full-on digital mini lab." The intent is not to rank the quality of each location or service, but to identify that the process is available. "We're not going to be strictly policing that," he said, "Although there will be a more stringent version of that next spring, ranking higher-quality printing systems."

Next comes a consumer outreach program. A video about printing from digital media will run on American Airlines flights in December during peak holiday travel. The same video will be made available for retailers to play in stores. "It's generic in the sense that we're not really promoting one technology or the other," said Pageau. "It is also tied back to a Web site called, prints-are-memories.com, where consumers can go to get some pretty unbiased information about digital printing." The site will also feature a function allowing consumers to find a digital printer near them. Eventually it will be incorporated into the QDPC identification program.

PMA will also be putting a different kind of public relations spin on imaging for the holidays with the consumer press. "We're saying, 'You wrote the digital camera story last year, this is the next step,'" he said. "If you're just going to write, 'Hey digital cameras are hot this year,' you're kind of missing half the story."

PMA plans to promote all forms of digital printing, from online services to at-home and in-store options, in all the various forms. "The message we want to stress is in the analog world, you're pretty much restricted to one process, one procedure," he said. "In the digital world, you can do that and so much more. We expect consumers to use a little bit of everything."

The challenge will be to truly alleviate the confusion surrounding digital printing. "We're not going to dwell on the technology," assures Pageau. "Right now the technology is incidental, we're targeting [relatively] new camera owners, to walk them away from the brink of confusion. This is just another camera, and this is just another kind of film."

And perhaps most importantly, the effort is being supported by many of the largest members of the photo industry. Wal-Mart, Costco, Eckerd, Fuji and Kodak were among those in attendance at that pivotal fall meeting from which this program was born. While camera manufacturers have been slower to get involved, "we are actively soliciting hardware manufacturers to include materials in their boxes," said Pageau. "This was designed as a way to get the dialogue started and design something that the industry can actually get around and use."