Hi. It’s Richard Askam, and I’m here to give you some bad news, I’m afraid. It gives me no pleasure to tell you this, but after thousands of years, the print industry is finally dead. It’s buried, it’s underground, it’s starting to rot, and I’m afraid it’s starting to smell.

Or is it? Or is it actually changed and nobody’s really noticed? Is it that there’s a new story happening, but we’re all focused on the old story. I think that’s probably more the problem, and actually you’re going to find this more and more that when you have a historical manufacturing industry, and it could be the car industry, it could be the print industry, you look anywhere that any industry has a legacy and most people focus backwards rather than forwards.

They’re trying to take what’s from the past into the future without futurizing it. That’s probably not very good English. So I don’t think the print industry is dead at all, and in fact those people that even ask the question should be taken outside and shot.

There’s a huge opportunity for the print industry to reinvent itself but it has to believe in the future. It can’t just completely consider the past all the time. My challenge to you is to tell an old story in a new way. A new way for the next generation of consumers, a new way for the next generation of workers. How many people out there have got teenagers knocking on their door desperate to work in print? How many have got teenage children that love the products that you produce but would like to learn a little bit more about how they do it?

I actually think the print business is going through the classic reinvention curve where it’s got to the bottom, and a lot of you have been in it for a long time and you’re probably making a little less money than you used to and to a certain extent that makes you feel depressed about the future.

But I’m an optimist. I think the future has got everything to offer and actually when you look at what you guys are capable of, and the products that are being brought forward in the market today, it’s got the brightest future of everything, because the one thing we will never lose as human beings is the emotional touch point that print brings. It’s why we print photographs and put them into frames. You don’t put an iPhone up on the wall and keep the picture in front of you. You print the photograph, you keep the photograph. When you look at the photograph, it reminds you of the thing that you photographed.

There is a huge emotional attachment to print that is underlooked and undervalued, and as a result I think there is the opportunity of a lifetime to make the next thousand years of the print industry the most exciting it’s ever been.

So, my advice, screw it. Just do it.