Digital Print Lives Up to Its Promises

A mere decade ago, digital printing was seen as a luxury buy for direct mailers—used only for ultra short-run campaigns that perhaps didn’t require a high level of output quality. Back then, several barriers stood between the direct marketer and digital print—print quality, cost-per-impression, color-matching capabilities, and limited media compatibility.Today, these barriers have all but been removed, enabling direct marketers to finally capitalize on the promise of digital print.Quality: Still KingMost digital print manufacturers contend that the quality of their printing systems’ output has greatly improved in recent years. That’s certainly measurable in print resolution. “When digital printing first emerged, the print resolutions were typically in the 240-dots-per-inch or 300-dots-per-inch range, with addressing systems printing at lower resolutions,” says Pat McGrew, director, transaction industry marketing, Kodak Graphic Communications Group, Rochester, N.Y. “Over the last 20 years, the advances in resolution across the range of digital devices have brought sharper print, sharper images, and more variety in color ranges, and the ability to create fine gradients,” he adds.Kodak Graphic Communications Group positions two of its digital printers for the direct response market: the Kodak Versamark D-series ink-jet family for personalization and addressing applications; and the Kodak NexPress for creating full-color direct mail campaigns.“We’ve also come a long way with the RIPs, with memory and processing power, so it’s really helped that you can RIP at the same rate you can print. That was always a problem in the past. You’d have this variable-data job that would take four days to RIP before you could start to print,” notes Tracy Yelencsics, manager, production color marketing at Xerox Corp., Rochester, N.Y.Hardware isn’t the only determinant of quality; it’s largely dependent on blending the right consumables—inks or toners and media. “High-speed production printing creates a stress case for the performance of the imaging system and, certainly, the toner in that system,” explains Mary Fromm, manager, toner and developing manufacturing group, Xerox Corp. “The printers need to be running at extremely fast throughput rates, and the customers have … very high standards about the quality of the prints.“All these conditions require a high degree of precision in the tolerances of the imaging systems and in the specifications of the toners,” Fromm adds. “For example, just prior to the introduction of our iGen3 110 Digital Production Press, we made some changes to the design of our toners, to make them more robust. … We wanted to ensure that the integrity of the toner particles would be maintained at such a level to deliver premium image quality.”Some might think that inks and toner come in garden varieties. But, in truth, toners range in shape and particle, and ink formulas greatly vary. While the print buyer may not need an intimate knowledge of the science behind ink and toner manufacturing, having a fundamental understanding of how inks and toners are applied to—and react to—certain substrates is invaluable. Keeping tabs on what’s happening in the consumables market will help direct marketers design better print and explore creative possibilities.Freddie Baird, executive vice president at QuantumDirect Inc., an Austin, Texas-based full-service direct marketing supplier, acknowledges that, at one time, digital print engines were limited in the types of media and substrates that could be used. Paper companies introduced specially formulated “digital printing” stocks that worked best with either toner or ink-jet devices. Today, Baird contends that digital printing systems are far less restricted. “We’re running everything from lightweight text papers to very heavy cover stocks—up to 350 gsm, 12- to 14-point stocks,” he explains. “There’s nothing our customers have asked for that we haven’t been able to run through [our digital press].”Robert Cooper, business line manager, continuous-forms solutions, IBM Printing Systems, also emphasizes the need for digital production processes to offer marketers variety in substrate choices. “When IBM [Printing Systems] made the decision to provide digital printings for the direct mail industry, [we] knew expanded media was an essential requirement,” he explains.“Two years ago,” Cooper adds, “IBM introduced the commercial print feature that supports the printing of heavier media. Previous systems supported printing on media up to 42-lb. paper. With the commercial print feature, the Infoprint 4100, for example, supports printing on seven-, eight- or nine-point coated paper commonly used in direct mail applications.”Hands-off PrintingThe evolution of digital printing technologies largely can be credited with marrying the process of print and e-commerce. Sure, many commercial printers have already taken advantage of the Internet; they use it to send and receive digital content, to exchange soft proofs, to share job status information and the like. But some direct mail printers have thought bigger, treating the Web not only as a portal for information, but as a production engine that drives the workflow.All of the jobs coming through the doors of QuantumDirect arrive via some electronic channel, according to Baird, including a highly automated, Web-enabled, job-management solution that feeds jobs directly into the printer’s production stream.“We have a Web-to-print application,” Baird explains. “Customers can go online and design a marketing piece.” There, the marketer is prompted for a few essential pieces of information about the job—how the job should be printed, finished and fulfilled, for example.“We have some built-in list capabilities … or they can upload their own list. Once they hit ‘submit,’ the servers do most of the heavy lifting,” Baird continues. “It builds the mailing list from the criteria the customer set, and the job is sent to production, where we have operators who choose which of our five [Xerox iGen3s] is available. … There is very little ‘hands-on,’ very little intervention required in the whole process.”Having a highly automated workflow is a win-win for both print supplier and direct mail customer. It ensures that printers keep their presses busy, while the customer reaps the benefits of fewer prep and labor charges on its print bill.Finishing the JobIn addition to all the improvements manufacturers have made to the print engines themselves, they’ve also been investing on the back-end as well, creating slick, in-line finishing modules to complement the presses.QuantumDirect, for example, has its Xerox iGen3s equipped with in-line booklet makers and saddle-stitchers, enabling a job to “come off finished, stitched and ready to go,” according to Baird. He estimates that 25 percent of the direct mail jobs his firm produces require some form of UV coating, but that process remains near-line for the time being.“We recently introduced in-line UV coating for the iGen3,” Xerox’s Yelencsics reports. “This is of particular interest to the direct mail market because when you have things going through the mail, a protective UV coating is very important.”Creating Colorful, Personalized Print“Color is the name of the game,” Yelencsics states, citing a recent CapVentures report that suggests color pages are growing by more than 50 percent each year. “[Rochester Institute of Technology] did a study not long ago that suggested adding color to a piece—with no personalization—increased response rates by as much as 50 percent,” Yelencsics notes. “And when you combine that color with personalized, variable-data printing, response rates go up even more drastically.”Baird points out that, “The cost has come down as the machines have become more reliable. I can tell you that our maintenance costs on digital printers were significantly higher 10 years ago than it is today. Back then, it actually made sense for us to maintain an offset operation. … But the cost of color eventually came down, and it no longer made sense for us to support an offset operation.”Kodak’s McGrew says it’s more important to focus on cost-per-response than it is on cost-per-impression. “There will always be a cost difference between the static offset pages, digital monochrome and digital full color,” he says. “However, the value of the digital, full-color page and its ability to elicit a higher response rate—because it’s more targeted and more personalized—is the real story. So, while digital printing costs have come down overall—partly due to faster print speeds and competitive consumable costs—the real story is that VDP [variable-data printing] pages are driving higher revenues for those who produce them.”“Although personalized direct mail has been talked about for years, it’s just now starting to come into its own, with increasingly more sophisticated results,” explains Joyce Virnich, vice president of marketing for Océ North America’s Commercial Printing Division. “Marketers have moved beyond the simple ‘Dear Jane Doe’ personalization to direct mail that is highly relevant. It’s taken that long for all the components to come together—from the software tools to the designers who understand how to build variable documents, [to] the marketers who mine the data.”Xerox’s Yelencsics recalls that, not long ago, the data accessible to direct marketers was dirty. “Or, they just plain didn’t have the data,” she suggests. “What we’re trying to do is to show folks that you don’t need 28 pieces of information about a person. With three to five pieces of good, solid information, you can produce a really great, targeted direct mail piece. So, the data is improving, and the hardware is improving, and all those pieces together [have] helped variabledata printing become prevalent.”Gretchen A. Peck is a freelance writer based in the Philadelphia area who covers the printing and production market.

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Digital Print Lives Up to Its Promises

Gretchen A. Peck

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Gretchen A. Peck