Dealing with new on-demand delivery channels

Print Action, May 2003 by Robinson, Jon

At the recent On Demand Expo in New York a small crowd gathered to see Barbara Pellow, Gannett professor of electronic printing and publishing at RIT, moderate a panel of industry leaders set to examine print as it relates to the likes of the internet, CDs, wireless technology and ebooks. Marlin Doner of Toronto-based Webcom fittingly opened the session by telling a story of people thinking that Webcom is an e-commerce company, because of its name.

At a tradeshow last fall, some people found it hard to believe that Webcom is a very traditional printing company with 200,000 square feet of manufacturing. Doner said the 28-year-old Webcom name just happened to grow into a nice branding coincidence because of today's prevalence of the Web and dotcoms. But it is because of the prevalence of the Web and dotcom models that many printing companies are being forced to change their traditional business strategies.

"We have experienced double digital growth over the last 20 years, in the last two years there has been flat growth," says Doner. "We are trying to change our approach to deliver content through many different channels."

Doner continued to say that Webcom breaks down workflow into four critical areas: creative process, content organization, managing content and the delivery. "Each are areas we can focus on and add value to because a lot of our customers struggle in the publishing workflow in the terms of getting their product to print and then running a parallel workflow and push it out to the Web, handheld devices and so on."

The panel discussed the fact that most of today's customers are risk adverse and that they do not want to invest in huge technological solutions, giving graphic communications companies the opportunity to set up partnerships to test and verify joint solutions. This builds loyalty and allows clients to see value before making big investments. The panellists suggested that before thinking about adopting technologies through such partnerships, it is important to understand the value of each delivery medium so it can be applied and fit to a customer's needs.

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"Mediums still have their own merit," says Carol McCarthy of Imagination Publishing, which caters to corporate clients within a controlled circulation. "Print still carries authority and creditability, the Web brings efficiency and accessibility and wireless will bring immediacy, in marketing terms there is an actionability to it."

Determining how these different channels can work together is one of the greatest challenges, and opportunities, for graphic communications companies. Often that challenge is lead by the clients themselves, while the graphics company is left with figuring out a solution. Panellists suggested it is important to get involved earlier in the workflow to provide direction that the printer can support.

Doner used an example of Webcom's work with medical publishers, who have traditionally used a book product, to illustrate the changes under way. He stated that for this particular market, distribution through electronic medium makes a better business model for them because it gives them a subscription-based strategy. This allows medical publishers to capture revenue before they distribute the content, whereas in the traditional model they had to print the book, pay the printer as the manufacturer and then distribute it out to the supply chain. It would take them sometimes 90 to 120 days before capturing their revenues, using this model.

Catalogue publishers on the other hand, continued Doner, are an interesting example of a customer base that initially moved into e-commerce but are now coming back to the printed product. While they still use e-commerce to actually fulfil orders, the printed catalogue is a vital tool to drive potential consumers to the e-commerce site. According to Doner, about 67 per cent of the catalogues distributed today are published with this as their primary purpose.

"We talk about the currency of content," says Doner, "and certainly in directories that content is changing so rapidly we are definitely seeing a trend away from print products and toward electronic content. We are supporting that."

That interactive publishing support at Webcom comes from its sister company called Edge Interactive. Although Edge is housed in Webcom's building, it is a separate entity with a very different culture, but more and more the two entities are working together to bring products to market. "We believe the future is going to include printed products but we also believe as a company we have to be aggressive in terms of where we are going in the interactive electronic market," says Doner, "and whether that is Web or CD or some other output, [the strategy] that is going to drive us moving forward is how we handle content today."

Webcom's goal, according to Doner is to create a central repository - a digital library - that drives this output process, which will allow the company to get involved earlier on in the workflow process. From a Cap Ventures study, relating the cost of the document, somewhere around $96 goes into preparing a document for output and only $14 is used to actually replicate it.