Dscoop9: Nothing Short of an Industry Watershed

It's been about a week since I got home from Dscoop9, this year's meeting of the HP Graphic Arts User Group. This was my fifth Dscoop, my first as a board member, and the best I've ever attended-- and, dare I say, the best one yet. There are so many things that make this the best event in the industry, too, it is hard to know where to begin. I guess the biggest thing is how much I bring back with me to Standard Register, plenty of new practical knowledge but more importantly many new ideas and new relationships.

Chris Petro, Dscoop Global Chairman, and Dion Weisler, EVP of HP’s Printing and Personal Systems organization, a $60 billion annual revenue business that includes personal computers, mobility devices, technical workstations, printers, graphics solutions, managed-print services and internet services.

The theme this year was "Break the Mold", which is quite appropriate.  This event surely does break the mold of the industry user group, typical conference, greatest trade show and any educational program--  all in one fell swoop.  And though it's become quite large, it remains an intimate gathering for unquestionably the most forward looking print service providers and their trusted partners-- those who are breaking the mold of what being a printer means every day.  With close to 2,500 print professionals and a solution showcase populated by more than 100 of those aforementioned partners, you almost need not attend any other annual event.  I would probably scratch GraphExpo off my calendar this year, were it not for Dscoop and EDSF activities in Chicago. 

This photo does not do justice to how big the room was, and how many people were in it!

Over 100 incredibly valuable conference sessions! I understand almost half of the companies represented this year were first time attendees!  I personally met a handful of prospective Indigo owners, which was really cool... each of them expressed how surprised they were with the size and quality, saying it was not what they expected.  As someone who is closely involved with the event, and I've been drinking the Koolaid since my first attendance, it's unbelievably thrilling to hear this sort of thing from a first timer. And while the organization has gone global, we've hosted events in Europe and APAC, more than 33 countries from around the world were represented in the audience here in North America. It's beyond impressive. 

Rod Key

Before I continue let me take a moment and mention Rod Key, who passed unexpectedly on Sunday, January 19, 2014. Rod was the founder of R and R Images, which was acquired by Shutterfly just last year. A special memorial was held on the Wednesday before Dscoop9; then, at the start of the opening session of the conference, Rod's wife Patti (with son Austin and other family members looking on) was honored with a special new Rod Key Excellence in Marketing Award, which was created in his name by the board. 

To say he will be missed is an understatement.

To quote Dscoop Global Board Chairman Chris Petro: "Our hearts, love and prayers go out to his wife Patti, son Austin and all of Rod’s family, friends and colleagues.  For those in our community who had the honor of meeting or working with Rod, you understand the sense of loss of our dear friend; it is extremely difficult to accept. His commitment to Dscoop was unending and his passion for our industry, our organization and our teams was unwavering. Part of the original Board of Dscoop, Rod previously served as North America Conference Chair, Marketing Chair and led countless other successful efforts in our industry. Rod's passion and love for the Dscoop community personifies the essence and strength of what Dscoop is all about. His loss leaves a hole in our community that we will never be able to fill." 

In honor of Rod, the Electronic Document Systems Foundation (EDSF) created the Rod Key Memorial Scholarship. Rod’s family has asked that all donations be made to the scholarship fund. 

Keynotes

Jason Jennings is a researcher and one of the most successful and prolific business and leadership authors in the world and his greatest thrill is helping lead individuals and companies to their full economic potential.

Jason Jennings, New York Times best selling author of The Reinventors – How Extraordinary Companies Pursue Radical Continuous Change shared some great advice.

He and his team studied more than 40,000 companies and identified the ten most productive companies in the world for his bestselling, Less Is More. The book revealed the secrets of the world's most productive companies. His work continues, and he shared insight on companies like Ikea and Starbucks, focusing on the leadership qualities they embrace that have made them outstanding among the best global companies. One notable takeaway: adding Oatmeal brought Starbucks an additional $500 million in revenue, virtually overnight!

Our second Dscoop9 keynoter was Scott Stratten. He is the President of Un-Marketing. He is an expert in Viral, Social, and Authentic Marketing which he calls Un-Marketing. Scott says it is all about positioning yourself as a trusted expert in front of your target market, so when they have the need, they choose you.

Scott Stratten shared some truly useful insight into social media marketing, and entertained the heck out of the standing room only Dscoop9 crowd

Stratten claims to have over 165,000 people following his daily rantings on Twitter and was named one of the top 5 social media influencers in the world on Forbes.com. When he was introduced at the event, it was characterized as "150 followers", which gave him fodder for some self-effacing jokes! "Me and my 150 followers".  He has written three best-selling business books, the newest being “QR Codes Kill Kittens” a picture book for fed-up business people. Extreme common sense.  I've been ranting for years now about what a waste of space QR codes are, but Stratten articulates in a funny and effective way that I never could, while at the same time offering plenty of very positive advice about how to use new digital technologies. Scott made this video before his appearance at Dscoop9.

Exciting Machines, Software, Real World Examples and Sessions

I've got to nerd-out on the Operations track sessions for at least a moment here.  My fellow board member Ed Wiegand is Executive Vice President at the Matlet group. Ed, a former VP from P&G, and a guy from an MIS vendor did an amazing live demo printing Olympic personalized Old Spice labels (28 different countries) on an HP 20000 across town from the event at Matlet's location, and boxes for the bottles down on the show floor, all through through an Esko workflow.  Very cool.

Randy Bice, long time Dscooper, hailing from RPI in Seattle, Washington brought us a wonderful track on Lean Manufacturing for Digital Printing Operations. I'll tell you what, you have to love companies in the industry who are not afraid to admit they print things.

Jennifer Matt from Web To Print Experts, Inc, did a nice job on a session on the applications of the same name (Web2Print).  Just don't mention that name to customers, because they won't know what you are talking about-- absolutely true, thanks Jenni!  She also hosted two other important sessions that mixed technology and business topics. HP has installed something close to 90 Indigo 10000s, the B2 format press that leads the Generation 4 line up and is the result of a couple of billion dollars in R&D spending.  So it was only appropriate that Jim Hamilton from Infotrends led a panel of users featuring Sandy Alexander and the UK's Precision Litho. The discussion included the market and applications, as well as practical examples. 

So many more sessions to name, not enough time to write about them here. Perhaps I will add some notes over time.

Boxes awaiting die cutting after being printed on the Indigo 30000

I hate to go down the "it was the inket drupa" kind of thought process, but there certainly were some leanings toward this being the "label and packaging dscoop".  HP has a new machine, the Indigo 30000 that makes boxes. It was shown operating in North America for the first time at the event. In the closing session, Indigo GM Alon Bar-Shany mentioned he was heading to Cincinnati to visit Innovative Label Solutions (another of my board member colleagues Jay Dollries' company), where were installing a new Indigo 20000 right after Dscoop. There was a TON of supporting finishing equipment, both connected inline and scattered around the Solutions Showcase. We don't like to call it a trade show, but it did look a bit like one. Only better!

I got an incredible education on the state of the art in wide format Latex printing from one of the HP guys.  I was just walking by, admiring the output, and he gave me a wonderful education-- brought me right up to speed on this awesome technology, as well as on the market. That's the magic of the event, so much knowledge in the house, just unparalleled.

Near the area I would call "Indigo Alley", pictured here before the opening of the event, there was a showcase of some of the incredibly cool products members have made with Indigos.  My crappy iPhone camera cannot do these items justice.

Introducing Dscoop University!

Dscoop University, debuting at Dscoop9 exclusively for Dscoop members, provides industry-leading, personalized education focused on supporting business strategies and accelerating growth. The curriculum is tailored for specific job functions within member companies: business owners, sales and marketing professionals and operations and production team members.

At Dscoop9, the new initiative started out with a bang by introducing several instructor-led courses on the opening days of the event:  three in sales, three in business management and two operations management focused.  These 3-hour interactive workshops were totally awesome, featuring subject matter experts for each session, ranging from university professors to HP experts. 

John Tenwinkel, the full-time Director of Dscoop University was recently interviewed by Whattheythink.  Dscoop University offers 24/7 access to training, on-demand content, live-streaming and downloadable resources, and in-person courses. Dscoop attendee members were given significant credits so they could try classes online for free!

Other Important Stuff

Dscoop and HP jointly announced the “Tell Your Story Sales Program.” It's clear that many people on the buy side are living in a "5 years ago" mindset, and this new program creates a beautiful frame work for print service providers to help them learn about the new capabilities and extremely high quality now possible with digital. It's chock full of sales ideas and tools, over 100 digital assets, as well as videos and PowerPoints. 

Next Year!

This year marks the end of my tenure as chairman of the Technical Operations committee, which has been a fantastic experience. But I will continue to contribute to Dscoop's newsletter.

More exciting is that I've been chosen as a member of the Conference Committee for Dscoop10.  This premier event has a track record of getting bigger and better every year, but I can tell you the 10th anniversary is going to be something extra special!!  Join us March 5-7, 2015 in Washington DC!

If you can't wait that long, Dscoop Asia 2014 will be held June 12-13 in Bali, Indonesia!

Look forward to seeing you at Dscoop!

QR Codes- Why, Why, Why?

Although the printing industry (or perhaps slightly more accurately, its consultants and journalists) seems to have latched onto QR codes in a pretty dramatic way, parallels can be drawn to the initial hype of VDP PURLs (Personalized URLs) that took place in the early 2000s. If you pick piece from a printing trade journal written seven or so years ago about VDP and PURLs, you could replace the acronym “PURL” with “QR Code”, and the piece would likely still have the same meaning; tell the same story.

In overview, the goal of QR codes is to enhance the user’s (i.e., reader or consumer) seemingly dull print piece with access to new, rich media experiences that complement the print piece. The flip side is the notion that the print piece is driving customers to the rich media experience waiting for them to view, to help “close the deal”. These are both worthy goals, but have encountered some challenges along the road to adoption.

For printers who have implemented VDP, QR Codes are technically just like implementing a PURL (Personal Response URL) on a printed piece—the benefit is that the recipient doesn’t have to type it in. This should increase the likelihood that the prospect will engage and see the additional content. That additional content to be provided via the QR Code’s link is often a mobile website these days, but can take other forms, like playing a video or showing a map. Like PURLS and other VDP applications, QR Codes can be “one to many”, where the same QR Code could be scanned by thousands of prospects, and they are all taken to the same unique content, or they can be 1:1, where each user gets their own personalized QR code, that takes them to some content that is personalized just for them. Printing QR codes is easy, and can technically be done by any Print Service Provider, using inexpensive and even free software.

One of today’s QR Code applications, readily seen, is on signs and graphics. The consumer at the point of purchase, or in the aisle of a retail store, is enticed by offer text and graphics on a printed piece; or the merchant wants to make a special offer on a particular product or add-on item.

QR Codes have appeared in many different shapes and sizes of printed products in addition to signage and display graphics. These include magazines and newspapers, brochures and datasheets, and even stationery including business cards. The results are mixed because of some obvious limitations of QR Codes.

The biggest obstacle is software that can read the code, which is relatively cumbersome to obtain today. This limits the audience for the code to tech-savvy consumers. While at this writing some 88% of smartphones have cameras, apparently only about 13% have software installed to allow them to read QR Codes. This special reader software must be installed on a smart phone to scan the code, and it is not included with Google’s Android smartphone software nor on the Apple iPhone and iPad devices. Until Apple and Google include native QR Code applications that automatically work with smartphones built-in cameras, QR codes will remain a curiosity that will only be used by technical and “bleeding-edge” users.

Another problem with QR codes is their size and appearance on the printed piece. To make them easier to scan, they are general fairly large on the printed piece. Making them bigger also makes them obvious to the user, because it’s a double edge sword—they are seen, but they are ugly (a bunch of square dots inside a larger square), as well as meaningless and unfamiliar to most consumers. All while taking up print “real estate”.

So although the QR Code is being touted by consultants and pundits in the printing industry, it has not achieved enough traction or “ubiquity” to justify the amount of attention it has received. Does it make print complement mobile? It technically can, but today the consumer has to be quite motivated (presumably by an enormously valuable offer) to act. While it could be said that this may be the problem, not the technology itself—i.e., the creativity and motivation of advertisers to actually use this new mechanism in campaigns— it’s kind of a chicken and egg thing, and if advertisers really saw the value in doing this versus alternatives, perhaps we would all be scanning QR codes multiple times a day.

There are other ways to achieve the same results that QR Codes are promising. A company called DigiMarc, based in Beaverton, Oregon (www.digimarc.com) has been creating what they call Digital Watermarks for many years. Their software accomplishes the same end goal as QR Codes, but without the visible barcode-style manifestation. The August 2012 edition of Seventeen Magazine makes extensive use of the technology. Similar to QR Codes, the company’s solution requires reader software to be installed on the consumer’s smartphone to activate the rich media experience (in this case, software that is proprietary to DigiMarc), leaving that hurdle for the consumer to overcome. Seventeen Magazine’s young readership may be a good test, because it “seems” likely they would engage and want to see rich media associated with the “fun” content in the printed magazine. We will stay tuned and look forward to seeing the results.

Image recognition technology is likely to become much more powerful in smartphones as their processor speeds and memory capacity increases. This will allow the phones to recognize images, and retrieve offers based on the actual image itself, without a code. Google has been working on such technologies for several years, and is likely to make this available as an adjunct to their Ad Words offerings in the future.

Voice Recognition software in phones is only in its infancy now with technologies like Apple’s Siri, but will very likely be used for advertising applications. Instead of having to scan a poster, for example, you could simply speak particular text from the poster (i.e., keywords) to Siri, and she would retrieve an offer for you on your IOS-based smartphone. Apple is making gigantic investments in mobile advertising technology, so we can expect this to happen sooner rather than later.

This is an excerpt from the paper entitled, "Does Print Complement Mobile Computing", by Chuck Gehman and David Uyytendaele, published in the TAGA 2012 Proceedings.