INKISH.TV: #IPD16
INKISH.TV participated in International Print Day 2016 by sending live every hour during the day – October 19th. We have made a shorter edit of the 1.4 hour footage – so if you would like to spent 14 minutes with our editor Morten Reitoft, please enjoy 🙂
This transcription is the FULL transcription. For FULL coverage, please see facebook.com/inkishtv
Welcome
Good morning to whoever might be looking at this episode here. This is a little bit unusual for us, because normally we spend a lot of time in recording and editing. So, this is with a selfie stick that I borrowed from my son this morning. We are at our office in Roskilde, just outside Copenhagen. My name is Morten Reitoft and I am the CEO of Inkish TV. It is really a great honor for us to celebrate International Print Day 2016. During the day, approximately every hour, we had a little subject ñ you can read about it on the Facebook page here.
And what is print about? You see, I think one of the important things about print is that print is a communication mean. All of us today are using Facebook, Twitter and emails as extremely fast and easy communication way, but printing is the thing that was before and it is also what is very much now. I think that during the day we will show a few things that print can do to you, do to our customers and try to figure out how we can use print in a way that can make our business better. And that is what INKISH is about. I donÃt know if you have been looking at some of our films, but we have produced about 100 hours of, in our opinion, high-quality television about the printing industry and how would be more natural to celebrate the International Print Day then by participating, of course.
During the day, we will talk about some kind of products and what they can do to you, but I would also like to take the opportunity to say what can you do in order to make the print business a little bit better.
Yesterday I went to the kiosk and bought these two English magazines ñ UK edition of Wired and a music magazine Sound and Sound. If you like print, I donÃt know how you think about it, but you can also get Wired as an e-magazine, but I really do like physical magazines, just to grab it, feel the paper, feel the touch and having a selection of high-quality great design, great print. I just think that itÃs awesome, basically. This is the second largest industry in the world when it comes to number of employees. If just all of us bought a couple of magazines every month, it would actually make an impact on the printing business.
So, if you like printed magazines, you should buy 1, or buy 2, or buy 3. I spend about $100-150 every month buying magazines because I like reading. I also like to support the industry that IÃm part of, and itÃs quite easy for everybody to do small things. If you are a print buyer and you are watching this broadcast here, itÃs also quite easy, because what you can do and I know that you as a buyer have to buy at competitive rates and I know that you have to be concerned about budgets, but if you produce a little bit better quality products, then maybe a little higher price tag can actually also give you a better financial output of what you are doing. During the day, I will show you some examples on how you can pimp your printed products by using different kinds of techniques.
I think that also a lot of people have now experienced that print is actually marketing tool that is now becoming exclusive product. Maybe not the ones that you get in your mailbox just thrown away, but if you go to book stores, we spoke with Jorgen Balle Olesen from Saxo.com just a couple of weeks ago. There is an episode of him on Inkish.tv and he said that there is a declining need or a requirement for e-books as an increase in physical books. Why is that? ItÃs not because they are cheaper, itÃs because as an application some books are just better. If you want to look up for a phone number, you will never go back to Yellow Pages, you will probably use some kind of online service. If you want to look in Wikipedia in relation to if you were looking at the old book, Wikipedia is probably better for most people, but for me magazines and books and printed matter is a great commodity and I think that as an industry we really need to tell our clients and prospects about the advantages of using printed products. I also, of course understand that using printed products is not a commodity, nor something that you do because of the emotion ñ most people who are print buyers, they buy print because it serves a purpose and of course, you can always argue that the price is one issue, because you tie money into a printed product, rather than just making a design and throw it online, but one other thing, which in my opinion is also extremely important, is what the product does for your product. I mean, right now the printing industry is having a great time about using packaging as one of the growing businesses. You canÃt imagine, for instance having a box of cornflakes packed in an iPad, so of course there are some obvious reasons to use printed product still, and I think that it also goes for marketing and for a lot of other different things.
One of the issues that we are facing as a huge problem in the printing industry, is obviously the increased cost of physical distribution and it is kind of strange, because if you look at Vistaprint, Amazon, or some of the really large retails online, they are able to ship out products cheaper than sending out a magazine here in Denmark, for example, up to 20 kilos worldwide, or at least in Europe.
I think that the industry needs to figure out new ways of making distribution easier. That might be consolidating business across companies, finding out different ways of making products available to your users and maybe even print closer to the source. Jorgen Balle Olesen again from Saxo.com, tells us that when a customer orders a book, if the turnaround time is lowered one day, the conversion rate is increased by 10%. This clearly shows that there is a need for reinventing ourselves, not just the products, but also the values around this one.
So, this was my good morning here from Inkish.tv. I hope I will see you in an hour when we are going to talk about the most important printed product in your business, which is in my opinion, the business card. Stay tuned and I hope to see you in a little less than an hour. Bye for now.
Business Cards
Hi, this is Morten Reitoft from Inkish.tv. We are streaming live here on Facebook, for the second time in our history. This time we will talk about a business card, which we find to be one of the most important business documents. I mean, of course a book, a magazine and a physical report have a higher value right now instantly, but I think that if you look at this here at my desk, I have gathered some business cards, which I have collected during my more than 20 years of business. This is just a fraction of it and most of them of course, exist in my LinkedIn profile, or my other social media and my contacts, but from all of these contacts I have here, IÃve probably at some point also got like a brochure, or a leaflet, or a flyer, or something like that, which in these past 20 years have not survived, but these business cards have survived.
What happens these days is that a lot of people choose to buy very, very cheap business cards, which can be fine for some people, but I think that actually itÃs a very, very small investment for your company and it has maybe a very long lifetime for existing.
IÃve picked up a few examples of some business cards I really like and let me show you one here first ñ this one is from a Danish printer called Ecograf. I know that itÃs difficult to show paper on a video, but this is a really nice paper reading in nice, vivid colors. It is a printing house that has specialized in the digital print only and they have chosen a substrate that is not an average paper.
So, that is one example and here is another example from one of our clients, actually ñ this is from On!Ad, a design agent, and what they have done here is quite great, theyÃve taken cardboard on one side, and they have made some die cutting here and made a quite nice business card. This sticks, right.
Here is a quite old one from OCE, the printing manufacturer owned by Canon today. Maybe you can see the structure in the paper and the reason why I find this as a brilliant example of a business card is that OCE, when this business card was actually made or invented, was the only printer in the market that was able to print on structured surfaces. So, choosing a substrate with a surface that is structured and making a print on it has a double purpose ñ it shows a product and it represents something that this company is quite unique for.
This is also a very nice business card from another Danish printer, and you can see that they have decided to just round two of the corners. ItÃs a double-sided paper, where they have like glued two pieces of paper together.
And here is a brilliant one, as well. Of course, if they canÃt make a nice business card, who can? This is Papyrus, and what they have chosen to print on here is a Gmund 925, which has silver on one side and black on the other side. ItÃs really cool.
The issue with a business card in my opinion and the reason why I find it to be one of the most important documents in the company is that it sticks, it is what you keep, and I have an example here. We have a business card here from a company that sells diamonds. I donÃt know if you can see that, but it has like a spot UV, it has a silver hot foil, and a really nice consistent design and it goes through. They have also made like a folder, they even made a small paper bag and you can see that everything goes through. So, all of the design elements that you found on the business card are also found on some of the other printed products they do. And this is in my opinion a brilliant example that a business card represents the value of the company and it actually goes through the design and the choices of substrates, printing techniques etc.
I also want to show you something here. This is from Polish company called Viper Print. What they have done here is they have made an example of some business card that is printed on plastic. These business cards are really cool. I am just trying to open this. And when you open the sample over here, I can just show you ñ here we have not only the plastic card, but itÃs also a plastic card combining Spot UV and hot foil, and this one is actually printed on an Indigo machine.
One of the things I also really like when IÃm participating at exhibitions like Drupa and GraphExpo is that a lot of these print manufacturers today spend a lot of time in explaining some of the applications, rather than just explaining the specifications of the equipment.
This is a box that we have made for our customers here, and when we do this, we put the ëFriends ?à logo on it. We do it as a hot foil, so this is like a matte laminated box with a silver hot foil on it. Is this box expensive? Yeah, itÃs relatively expensive, but what does it do when the customer opens the business card that he has ordered. If you sell cheap business cards, it might be all sold, but if you sell exclusive business cards, it might serve a purpose that is really good.
Also, here is another example of packaging for business cards. This is for diamonds. You can see here, itÃs actually very simple, itÃs a great board. It has a die cut, so instead of putting a name on it, you can actually see the business card directly through the hole. ItÃs very simple and very cheap to make, but the impression lasts, in my opinion.
When we talk about the business card as the most important document, itÃs not because itÃs more valuable, or more expensive, or higher profit, or even more expensive for the customers ñ itÃs simply because this document sticks. In our opinion, itÃs like if you want to make an impression and you want that impression to last, whether you pay 10 cents, or 50 cents or even $1 for each business card, it might be the best investment you can do, and it might be something that can make you really stand out from the crowd. When I look at the bunch of business cards I just showed you here on my desk, I would say that about 90% of them are quite boring. Maybe the only purpose, and the reason why I save them is because the person that gave it to me was at some point an interesting person to talk to and they had a product or a service that I really appreciated. This is good, of course, but the 10% really stand out. These are just a few examples of it that I showed you here, and in my opinion itÃs a stupid product to save money on. Make a business card that really sticks with your customer, that really represents the kind of product and service you sell, and IÃm certain that even the higher-priced tag for this would pay off for the customers eventually.
So, thatÃs why we find the business card to be the most important document that you might invest in as a company, and I think that you should talk to your printer and see if they can do something that is a little extraordinary. It is good for your business, IÃm certain about it and IÃm certain that if you have a business card that sticks out, people will save it, they will use it for future reference and I donÃt know how you feel about it, but if you want to talk to somebody who is serious, maybe a business card is as important as a website. I donÃt know, but here is at least our hint for it. I hope you enjoyed and in an hour, at 11 a.m., you will see us for the third time. We will show you some examples on how you can pimp your printed product. Stay tuned!
Pimp you Print
And we are back! I was just about to start in Danish, because as you might already have guessed, IÃm from Denmark. My name is Morten Reitoft and I am the CEO and the Editor of Inkish.tv. We are here to celebrate International Print Day 2016, and we are celebrating it by making these (this is our third time doing it) live broadcast videos on our Facebook wall about print. I hope you like what we are doing.
This episode here at 11 a.m. is about how to pimp your print. If customers donÃt know that you can do special things with print, why should then they ask for it? This was an idea for me and for us. I think that a lot of print today is like a commodity print where itÃs like CMYK print on standard coated paper, which is good for some purpose, but sometimes it is really interesting to make something which is a little bit different from everything else.
Let me give you some examples of some print that we like. The first one I will show you, and itÃs not so easy with a hand-held iPhone on a camera stick, but maybe you can see here, it is a hot cover book. I picked it up from Lithuanian printer called Repro, and the design is quite funny. ItÃs a cooking book in four different languages, and you can see that first of all the pictures has been manipulated to a fun extent. There is a paper here with a nice print, and everything is just nice with this book. But the thing here also that they have done in order to stand out a little bit from the crowd is that each signature here is a bit different. So, if you look at this one, you can see that it opens out like a spread, but then it has like a page turned inside the spread, as well. By doing this on all signatures, I can imagine how difficult it is from a bindery perspective, but nevertheless it has a stunning look and it is just a great way to do something different that will stand out and IÃm certain that a lot of people who buy this book will appreciate that it is a little bit different from every other book they have.
ItÃs not just a matter of having a strange page to stand out, it actually serves a purpose, because since there are 4 languages, the recipes on the same page have one page for each language, so you can see the picture and you can read the recipe in one of the four languages in the spread or in the signature. So, that is kind of cool.
Another thing I would like to show is that you can use die cutting for, kind of, cool things here. IÃll just extend my arm a little bit here if I can, itÃs a bit odd to do this, I should have my cameraman Jan here, but he is in Sweden, I am in Denmark. This is actually a book made by a Danish designer, Trine Dvinge, and the purpose for this book or brochure here was about different layers in an organization, so rather than just having a traditional booklet, you can see that it is die cut as babushka, so it has the same shape. This book or what you call it, has also been made in probably one of the largest printed 16 pages-books in the world. It has been made as a 180cm-high book, where the staples used to stitch it were made by a Blacksmith, so they were 15 times bigger than a regular thing.
So, this is an example on how you can pimp a print by making it into different shape. The same design from Trine, she has also done this book. This is a quite cool book that has these pages that stick out from design, as you can see. And the purpose here is ñ this is a book for an architectural competition, and if you look you can see that the logo and the way the book has been designed have a great consistency with the product. This is something that really stands out, itÃs really a beautiful design, itÃs a really nice way of doing something which is really special and stands out in a way. I am certain that the architects who have participated in this competition have got something which is definitely standing out from the crowd.
About a year ago, we visited a very nice packaging printer in Sweden called Gafs Kartong. It was a sponsored episode by Highcon, and the reason why we went there was because they were the first in Scandinavia that have invested in Highcon Euclid, laser die cutting. And what they have done is this award-winning packaging product here, which consists of two die cut layers ñ the green one as you can see, and the blue one. This was actually used to sell apple juice of high quality. IÃm quite certain that a product packaging like this probably is more expensive than just a regular box, of course, but IÃm also quite certain that when you go to the supermarket, or to the grocery store and you see packaging like this, it has a selling point that makes it easier for the customer to believe in this product as a high-quality product. So, this is definitely a way to pimp your product. For those of you who have been at Drupa, a lot of things are going on at HighconÃs booth, they are very interesting company. Now they also have a high-speed laser die cutting. It is an extremely high-quality and diverse product and this just proves to me that laser die cutting is definitely something that is worthwhile looking into. So, a great product and a great way of pimping your product.
A few more things ñ if you want to do something that will pimp up your product a little bit, not a little bit but in a cool way ñ this is a New YearÃs invitation from the most exclusive hotel. Basically, this is munken polar rough paper, and then you can see here that it has white and gray print, and then it has like the paper collar sticks out of it, but what really makes it stand out is that it has a lot of silver hot foils put into the design. It is really nice-looking invitation. This is exclusive; this is something that is made to stand out and to make sure that the customer really benefits from these, kind of, special techniques.
As for ourselves, unfortunately we didnÃt make so many of these, but we will soon make a re-print of them. We have made an INKISH.TV postcard. The difference here from the traditional postcard is that it is actually a player. So, as you can see here, we have a built-in screen, there is no content on it right now, so thatÃs why it has this error message, but here you have control buttons, you have like 8 GB of memory and this is not as expensive as you might believe. So, if you have like a few people you want to impress by adding video to your offerings, this is a great way to do it.
Final thing, here in Denmark, I think a lot of people are printing in the CMYK colors. Commodity printers are good at it, itÃs cheap, but you can actually make something that is relatively cheap even at any printer. We have done this brochure here. This brochure is printed in PMS colors only, and I donÃt know how much you can see on the screen, but by having these very vivid colors, you are able to choose something where you print with one or two colors, which is inexpensive and looks just as great, which will make your design and your product stand out. It is a very, very inexpensive and affordable way to make sure that your product can stand out from most of the commodity-printed products.
Of course, you can pimp your product also by using different kinds of laminations or bondages, doing different kinds of screen printing technologies and of course, also from Israeli Scodix and French MGI, Jet One, and all these kinds of new equipment that can make sure that your printed product stands out a little bit from the crowd.
These were just a few examples on how you can pimp your printed products and I am quite certain that if you choose to do that, or you choose to present this to your customers, even though the price tag might be a little higher than a standard commodity print, I am quite certain that the output and the value of this is higher than just using a 4-color print on a paper. And I forgot one thing, which is really, really important here is of course to choose the right paper for the product ñ to have non-branded papers for high-value products is not pimping your product, in my opinion. It serves a purpose, it is good if you make a flyer, a small brochure and things like that, it might be fine, but if you are concerned about your image and the way you work, you should take a look at some of the paper collections that every merchant or paper producer produce. They spend an awful lot of money and time in doing this and they are a great inspiration themselves, and the amount and vast range of substrates you can choose from is simply amazing. I hope this could inspire you a little bit to actually dig into what your customer might need or what you can suggest them to use in order to present their brand and their services better. So, stay tuned, now we will have like a two-hours break and we will be back at 1 p.m. Stay tuned and see you soon again. Bye, bye!
Paper
Hi, this is Morten Reitoft from Inkish.tv once again and fourth time today. For me itÃs quite easy to just show the fingers, because then you can actually see the sequence of the episode weÃre doing on our Facebook.com/inkishtv, which is probably where you are seeing it right now. This episode here is about how to choose the right paper. We do these films to honor The International Print Day 2016, and we hope that you will just enjoy and listen, and maybe learn a little bit.
Talking about choosing the right paper is obvious for a lot of people in the printing industry, but for people who are not in the printing industry, it might be difficult, because we say a lot of words that are not the same everywhere. We also take a lot of things for granted and I think that in order to help our customers to become better buyers, we should also help them differentiate what kind of paper theyÃre going to choose for their printed products.
For a start, I apologize to our American viewers, because I am referring to standards from Europe and the rest of the world, so I am using the GSM standards for describing the paper things, but I hope that some of our American friends will either do a translation, or maybe weÃll do an episode explaining the same things in American kind of way.
In the printing industry, we often hear that people order: ìI just want some business cards on some nice paperî, or ìI just want a magazine on some shiny paperî, or ìI wanted to have a super surface that is glossyî, I mean these kinds of things that are not like ëone to oneà kind of descriptions. LetÃs start with a very, very simple way of defining paper. The uncoated paper, which is one type of paper, is the paper that you typically use for notes and notepads, paper in your printer at your office, at your home. It has kind of a rough surface, because itÃs uncoated, which makes it perfect for writing and drawing on it, either if you are using a pen, or a bold pen, or some crayons, these kinds of things. This paper is just perfect for it. This paper is also giving a little bit more natural look to use of paper. So, if you are a company that wants to give an impression of being organic, or being environmentally friendly, though the paper might have the same specifications when it comes to environment, this might be a good way, because customers will look at this as a kind of paper that represents environmentally friendly values, for example. Also, this kind of paper is quite common to get as the recycle paper, and the amount of the virgin fibers in the paper, and a lot of other specifications that a lot of people who know more about it than I do can explain, but you can have like more grayish paper, more yellowish paper, more white paper, depending on how the paper is actually produced. Uncoated paper is for when you have to write something on it, or if you want to have more like a natural look representing your brand.
Then, the next thing in some countries is called silk coated, I think the more correct term would be matte coated paper. Matte coated paper has like a smooth surface. It is very often used for magazines, for brochures, for fiscal and annual reports and things like that, because it combines high-quality look and itÃs still very readable to look at, because when you read it, the reflections from the light are kind of limited relating to it. Here is a magazine, as an example, which was printed a year ago. I will return to this in a moment, because there are some other things that you have to take into consideration.
And then finally, the last, and this is not a 100%, this is just like giving a very rough idea about different kinds of paper, then you have the gloss coated paper. Gloss coated paper has like very smooth and shiny surface, and it can be very good if you use it for photos, brochures of different kinds of products, if you want to be very representative in a way itÃs done. And within these different types of paper, you can have a huge range of different qualities, different kinds of paper, and things like that. This is basically where it becomes a little bit tricky, because I mean, as I said in the beginning, sometimes customers ask for shiny paper, or matte paper, without specifying it. Also, sometimes we get inquiries like: ìI just want it on thin paper or thick paperî, and both terms are not like a factual term, itÃs just like an emotional term. When we define the quality, we define that very thin qualities of paper have a very low GSM, and very heavy papers have a very high GSM (gram per square meter). Typically, in Europe and in Asia, you would say that for example, for business card you would have 300-350 grams, even 400 grams of stock. If you have covers on a book, it could be like cardboard, like chromo card kind of paper, where it has a glossy surface on one side and it has uncoated touch on the other side, typically ranging from 240 to 270, 280 grams, and content is typically ranging from 80, 90 to 130, or 150 grams, again depending a little bit on what kind of product is to be, depending on page numbers, on what kind of output you want, about which printing technique you might choose to work with and a lot of other things.
You see, paper is something which is really great. There is a lot of paper in the market, so it can be very difficult to choose from these papers. Most printers today worldwide have what they call house papers. That is like, for example, if you choose standard matte coated 130 GSM paper, you will just ask for a 130 GSM paper, and then the printer that you talked to will have the preferences often based on what kind of price agreements they have with the merchants or the paper mills.
What you have to take into consideration when you choose paper is also the print run you have, because if you print digital that is relatively low volume or with variable data. If you have like medium range, thatÃs typically printed in sheet offset or litho, and if you have larger print runs, you will probably use web offset printer. When you choose digital, you have to take into consideration both, the sizes of paper that are available, or maybe some of the digital printers require that itÃs a pre-bonded paper in order to be used 100% correctly, and if you have like medium print run, which is typically from 5-6 copies, depending on page numbers, you will probably choose to work with a litho printer on this one. The formers are almost limitless, so donÃt worry too much about that, but if you go to, letÃs say, beyond 15,000 or 20,000 in print run, you would probably choose to work with web offset or heatset, like the magazine here that I promised to return to that is printed in 30,000 copies. The paper is a 250 gram-cover, and it is a 115 grams matte coated paper on the content pages. The reason why this is important is because also when you look at the offerings in the market ñ if you look heatset, web offset printers, most of these printers only print content on substrates up to 130 grams. That means that if, for example, you have a very, very large print run, and you have a very heavy stock inside on the content pages, you may have to choose to print in the sheet offset rather than the web offset. And web offset has a lot of advantages, and also some disadvantages, on the plus side, if you can say that. It is fast; paper in reels is cheaper than paper in sheets. Today, the color and the quality of print is very similar and a very, very high quality.
So, you would probably have a quite substantial savings if you can fit your product into a web offset machine. Each printer typically has its own reel sizes, or limited reel sizes, diameters, so they can have different number of pages on one turn on the web offset machine, and therefore it is extremely important that you have a format and you have chosen the paper that fits the printer that you work with. That is quite important.
If you are below 10,000, or you donÃt care so much about the budget, or you have requirements that are like a must-have – this kind of paper on these different sizes of formats and things like that ñ then, of course, you just have to pay whatever it costs. But that is a differentiation that you have to take into consideration when you choose the paper, and when you choose to work on your product. I donÃt know how it is worldwide, but I can tell you in the area of the world where we work, typically in Germany, Scandinavia and the Baltics, the price difference is quite large between sheet and the web offset, and here it is also a little bit limited in the range of paper stock that you can actually get in reels for these kinds of machines.
So, you should talk to the printer of choice, and you should listen to their advices, because they have a great knowledge about how foldings can be done in linen machine and what kind of paper to use.
But, letÃs get back to the more interesting part. LetÃs see, in Europe it is quite common that we have like a few very big merchants ñ Papyrus, Antalis, Igepa, and a few other really large suppliers of paper and most of them produce either sample books like this, where you can see that you can look at different kinds of papers. Here is from another kind of presentation of how itÃs done. Here are the colors of the papers. Papyrus has a fantastic collection, and a fantastic range of papers. See for example here, this is the Danish edition where you have like text in cover and when you open this sample book here, you can see that you have the colors, you have the grammage here, you have the different types of paper in colors, and all of these is made to make it easier for you to actually choose the right paper if you have an idea what you want to do with it. And what do you want to do with it? Yeah, thatÃs a good question, too.
Here we have an example of an art print that we did a couple of years ago. The idea with this print was actually to make a print that looks like art, so itÃs been printed on a multi-offset, which has like a matte surface, it has a good color representation. And this was chosen based on giving a customer some samples of the blank paper and then finding a way where we could easily represent the colors of this. This is by the way, 5-color job, where you can see that we have CMYK colors, and then we have the PMS Neon colors here, and it just looks awesome, in my opinion.
Another example here is from a law firm in Denmark, called Bech Bruun. They have chosen to work with the paper called Soporset, and if you look at the Soporset paper here and compare it to the others, you can see that three different colors here are all white, but when you put them in comparison to each other, you can see that this one is more yellow than this one, and this is extremely white. Actually, to my knowledge, the Soporset is the whitest paper you can get right now. ItÃs a relatively expensive paper that has good qualities when it comes to print, and this law firm is using this paper for all of their printed products. This is actually one of the things that I find to be very important if you have a brand ñ donÃt just choose a non-branded paper type. If you are a brand, and you are serious about how your customers perceive you, you should definitely spend some time finding the paper, put it in your design manual, make sure that the printers that you work with actually have an understanding that itÃs important to use the paper that you have chosen, in order to make sure that you have a consistent touch and feel of your marketing material, your stationery and everything you do in the company.
So, use this. I guess that all of the paper merchants worldwide have collections of paper that you can choose from. Also, one of the things I would like to refer to is Sabine from PaperSpecs.com, which is a truly great and inspiring service for choosing paper, where for a relatively cheap subscription, you can have a lot of information on paper. And they have people in the field that constantly update the information that you might need for what kind of paper you want to represent your design and your company on. A lot of other people are obviously working hard on making sure that this gets done. I spoke to Chris Harold from MohawkPaper, a couple of years ago and I think that actually last year theyÃve won an award for the best print, because they have an HP indigo machine at the paper mill, so they can actually make sure that the paper and digital printers work perfectly together. When HP Indigo, exhibits at GraphExpo, for example, it was recently, they spend a lot of time displaying some of the applications they actually make, and that is based on high-quality paper, based on paper that serves its purpose, based on substrates that actually promote the product and service, and it is just simply great.
Well, this was long, but the people that know me, know that I speak a lot. Paper is a field I am very interested in, and I hope also that sooner or later Inkish will get an invitation from the paper mill. Please listen up if you are from the paper industry, because we would like to see how paper is made, and we would like to give our audience a view on how complex paper is. ItÃs a great product, it differentiates you from your competition again, and even though it differentiates you a lot, some of this paper is not that expensive. So, this is not about making your product more expensive. This is actually about finding paper that supports your brand and your identity aligned with the products and service. That is definitely the best.
Well, I hope you enjoyed and I will see you maybe in 40 minutes. See you!
Print vs Electronics
Hello again! And this is number five. My name is still Morten Reitoft and IÃm still the Editor and the CEO of Inkish.tv. We are sending from our office in Roskilde. We are very unexperienced in sending Live, but itÃs been fun so far. The reason why we are doing this is as I mentioned in some of the other episodes is that we really support the #IPD16, The International Print Day 2016, Smart Print founded by our really good friend Deborah Corn ñ thank you Deborah for everything.
Well, I actually changed my mind ñ I was supposed to talk about CMYK versus Pantone, but I changed my mind. You see, that is advantage of being an editor, you can choose to change agenda if you want to. So, I changed agenda to Print communication versus Electronic communication, because it seems that somebody believes that itÃs either print or digital. I would say that the interesting part here is to have both, because every communication channel has its advantages and disadvantages. Obviously, the fun part about sending video like this one right now is that I can see how many people view this film. If you want to write to me during the broadcast or after, at our Facebook wall, we can communicate. ItÃs easy, fast, convenient, most people have a computer or a smartphone just next to them 24/7, 365. So, for me electronic communication is just fantastic. I love Facebook, emails, and newsletters, things like that.
I met Melissa, who you maybe know also from Graph Expo that was presenting what you can do with Twitter, and how can you gain new customers and things like that. Hang on a second here, because weÃre sending from the office and that means that we have business to do, as well. Now there is a transportation guy picking up some stuff. This is Tobias, say ëhià Tobias. Now he is in the film, too. That was not planned, but he is a nice guy.
So, itÃs not either print or electronic, in my opinion. ItÃs more a question of finding the right media, the right communication platform. Here is an example: If you want to advertise on Google, and you use AdWords, why is then Google sending out physical introduction letters with a voucher for 600 Danish Krone? And they do it frequently to the same companies over and over again. Well, in my opinion thereÃs only one reason. ItÃs because it works. Even though you communicate online, you sometimes need to have something that you can send out to people that you donÃt communicate with online. At least, in most of the world today we have kind of quite restrictive ways of communicating via mail. You canÃt send an unsolicited mail to anybody without having potential problems, but you can send a physical letter to whoever you want.
Google is doing this because they are not communicating with every decision maker in the marketing value chain, so far, and thatÃs why they use this. I am certain that if it didnÃt pay off, they wouldnÃt do it. That is one reason why one technology, or one platform is not more important than the other one. Also, when you use social media, newsletters and things like that, there is a tendency with an overload of information. I donÃt know how you see it, but my email inbox has a filter, because I have things IÃd need to attend to and IÃd like to attend to, and there are things that I try to put aside, maybe not by unsubscribing to a newsletter, but at least put it elsewhere until I have time. What happens often is that I donÃt ever get time for it, because it is fast communication, or maybe a time-limited communication, and this is where I really like the printed material, because it seems to have a longer expiration date. I donÃt know about you, but I have been subscribing to a Wired magazine, for example, that IÃve showed you in the first film, for maybe 10 years, or something like that. I have all of the issues back in my office at home. And I do take out the magazines from time to time, to read them and be inspired and also sometimes just laugh of predictions made about 5 years ago about how technology would be in 2016, which obviously seldom is true. I canÃt remember if IÃve ever taken an old email from anybody, unless it was a customer, or a supplier, or a prospect, but not newsletters sent out like 2 years ago; I cannot recall that I have ever opened it again and read it, and got inspiration from it.
So, if you want to have a long-term relationship with your customer, maybe the printed material has some advantages over the electronic communication. Sometimes also, you know, those QR codes and there are a lot of discussions about augmented reality, virtual reality and all these kinds of things. Even the new IKEA catalog and a lot of HP magazines are augmented reality enabled, and I donÃt know. Honestly, I got a book from HP at the recent Graph Expo, where you were supposed to download an app and then you could scan pages and QR recognizes pages and gives you some interactive content. Well, maybe IÃm just old-fashioned, I didnÃt like the content, but I liked the idea that I could get added content from what I was actually reading. But the content was shit. So basically, if you are in a situation where you really want to have a combination using QR codes, or augmented reality, or anything else, it requires a lot of you. Because I mean, to write a book, to make a design, to print it and to publish it, is a long process, it takes a lot of time. And for people who think that making a video is very easy and convenient and mush faster ñ yeah, you are right, it is just faster like I am doing right now, put over a selfie stick with an iPhone and just publish it on Facebook directly, but I donÃt have any ideas that what IÃm saying here has a really long-term usage for you. I hope you like what you hear, maybe you agree, maybe you disagree, but both communication channels or all communication channels have their advantages and disadvantages.
In that respect, Inkish.tv is doing this. We will do the last episode in an hour about why we are doing Inkish, but in relation to the value of the printed material, we made an episode called Bizz Talk with a guy called Lasse Krogell. He is the CEO of The Federation of Printers in Finland, and what they have done is a survey, actually more of a scientific research about the value of print. One of the quite interesting things is that they gave a printed catalog to shoppers in a furniture store, and the average turnover from the customers who got this catalog was more than 500-700 euros higher per a visit than the ones that only got information from the Internet. This is like a scientific research, so this is not like a ëone offÃ, this is something that they have proven, that was scientifically done from a University in Helsinki, or in Finland, at least.
IÃm just saying that everything that we do in our industry needs to be aligned with what a customer needs, basically. I hope that maybe this could inspire you to think about how you can convince your clients that the printed product has an advantage, not only over the digital communication, but also in relation to obtaining the customerÃs objective. This is what we try to do and work on every day, and I really hope that you will be able to convince your clients that print has a future and believe that print has a great placement in the value chain also from a customerÃs perspective.
Well, see you around 3 p.m. when I will talk about why we are doing Inkish.tv. Thank you very much!
This is why we make INKISH
Hi, this is Morten Reitoft from Inkish.tv again. This is I promise you, the last episode that we are sending today. IÃm sorry because, as I told you in the other episodes, this is a selfie stick that I hold ñ so IÃll show you, this is like 5+1, so a number 6, okay? I hope you liked what youÃve seen. As I mentioned a couple of times today, we are doing this in respect and honor of the #IPD16 and The International Print Day 2016. I guess that a lot of people that will actually watch this, comment on it, or whatever, are people from the printing industry. Obviously, we know how important this industry is, because we know that we have a living out of this, so there are a lot of reasons for making sure that this day is honored helping us to achieve what we want to do with print.
The reason why I say this is because this is more or less the same reason why we started Inkish.tv almost two years ago now. Let me just start somewhere ñ we thought that Inkish is a brilliant name, because it was like Ink-Ish, and itÃs only a few English-speaking people that have actually understood that, but now youÃve got the story about it.
The reason why we started doing Inkish.tv was simply because, as you may know, we are from Denmark, and Denmark is a very small country on top of Germany. When we started to do this, it was based on that I was curious to learn more about the printing industry and I got information from YouTube, from Google, like everybody else, and my issue was that most of the information I got was either about equipment, ads from hardware or software manufacturers, or films made from printers showing what they have been able to produce. Everything was fine, everything was good, but I needed some kind of inspiration for my printing business. We thought that it would be important to have a channel where business leaders could inspire each other, so we tried to dig up histories with exciting people from around the world, and we have produced episodes from trade shows around the world. The first one we did was from Print & Pack in Dubai, a very interesting episode, or a show. We have obviously made films from Drupa, and from local exhibitions here in Scandinavia, and we have covered The Graph Expo in the U.S. two times, and we have covered a lot of printing houses, managers and decision makers from printing houses around Scandinavia and Europe. Just after Graph Expo, we actually made our first episode from Orlando talking to Lawton Connect. ItÃs not published yet, but it was really great, one of the AmericaÃs oldest printing houses, more than a 100-year-old.
I mean, we also were asked to participate at the PrintVerse booth at Graph Expo, which was a good experience together with great people from Rochester, from Avanti, from Info Trade, from Xerox, and it gave us a good impression that there is maybe also a need for what we do in the American market.
So, Inkish is about sharing knowledge, itÃs about inspiring business leaders, about giving information on what is actually happening and I can tell you, we have not just covered, but also discovered some of the very exciting things. Just in the background here on the television, you can see our website, which is called INKISH.TV. The episode that is currently on the front page is a very, very interesting story with the title ëWho makes money in the printing industry?Ã. This is a survey that has been done with the business intelligence company called Bisnode, together with the Federation of graphical industries in Sweden. The story is simply that they have taken a lot of physical data from 2,000 companies over these past 7 years and turned them into a report where they show how are commercial printers compared to binders, to large format printers, to print brokers etc. This kind of information in our opinion is something that you as a business manager can use to actually make your own business better. By having a great knowledge about understanding which industry you are part of, why your company is maybe not performing as good as you wish, this is what we believe could help the industry to actually become better.
On top of that, we are building a lot of services, we have a global calendar with the events from everywhere. All of the episodes and all of the calendar activities can be embedded on your own websites, free of charge. You can share the content if you like, but first and most important is ñ please watch what we are doing and please respond, comment, and interact with us. We are a small, 3-person company from Denmark, we are doing this out of the good heart, we hope that sooner or later we will make some money on it. I hope that my business associate Magnus can hear what IÃm saying right now, because he is the one writing the checks right now.
This is because we really, honestly believe that there is a need for this kind of service to the printing industry. Fortunately, we have got some good feedback from the market and also from some potential business partners. The films we make are long, comprehensive, deep. All of the films we do have transcriptions, so itÃs easy to make a Google translate into any other language if you need, to understand what is said. Even though we are from Denmark, we try to do everything in English, but we are very, very proud of what we have done now. We have about 60,000 viewers on the channel ñ some episodes a very few people, some episodes a lot of people. We donÃt sell any AdWords or anything like that, so we donÃt care so much about how many people see each episode, but of course itÃs an encouragement for us if we can get feedback from the viewers about what they think and how they like or dislike the content that we are producing.
At least, those are some of the reasons why we are producing Inkish. We at Inkish support the industry as good as we can, with limited resources we have. We do that by, for example in Norway there has been a giveaway of a 100,000 painting books for children. We made a small film about that giveaway to support the industry in Norway. We have been covering some local events by the Federations here in order to support local activities. If you have a local activity in your part of the world, share it with us. At least we can put it on a calendar, maybe you can even come and cover it. This is about sharing information and inspiring people to make our printing industry better and more profitable. I think that is the exact same reason why Deborah Corn initiated the IPD16, IPD17 etc. So, I hope this is the last episode for today from Inkish.tv. We have made like these 6 episodes now and now we are changing time zone, so maybe America will take over now. Also, IÃve just read from the ipd.printmediacentr.com website had almost 7 million lines of tweets that has been from the #IPD16, so far. ItÃs just amazing to be part of it. Have a great International Print Day and all the best to the printing industry!
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