Produced By PrintMediaCentr.com

Hey everybody. Welcome to the Canon Solutions America customer experience center. We’re here with Tanya Powers, one of the OG Project Peacock presenters. We’ve been presenting Project Peacock in the conference rooms of agencies, brands, and corporations since 2017, and thanks to your support we have blown this up to the next level and we are now filming Project Peacock Peeks, which is a series of educational videos where we’re going to show you the print customers out there some really cool applications. These happen to be coming from Canon. So why don’t you talk a little bit about what you’re showing here today?

Well, first, thank you again for having us here, and welcome to lovely Boca Raton, Florida. Really, we have a variety of print applications that are being enabled on our inkjet technology specifically. And really the reason we wanted to focus on inkjet was there’s so much happening in the technology over the past few years and the industry is just very unaware it’s happening so fast. It’s almost impossible to keep up with it. So, in conversations I’d had with you over the previous years and other participants, it really became an obvious need for us to help provide some of that education in the industry. So that’s what really triggered it for us, and we’re all about providing that education to help advance and grow this industry and get it where it needs to be, to help all the businesses become successful.

One of the points that we are very sure to make during Project Peacock is that paper, ink, and press or now a combo platter?

They are.

You don’t just want to pick up a piece of paper and say, print clusters out there and designers, we know you and we love you because you want to use the cool, funky substrates. And we’re not saying you can’t, but we’re saying that you have to make sure that you can in order for you to achieve the result that you, the desired result. And to Tanya’s point, it could just be a matter of not adding the extra blue into the black or pulling a little back on the full coat of a sheet.

You don’t have to sacrifice the quality or the brand or anything like that. There’s just some little things that can make a huge difference that can still show a beautifully produced campaign and materials across a variety of substrates when you have these little tidbits in mind when you’re doing the designing.

So let’s go through some of the samples that you think are really great examples or maybe unexpected examples for inkjet.

One of the things I really like is a unique campaign that we designed across … It happened to be our very own print I series, technology sheet fed, and we really wanted to highlight the flexibility of the variety of substrates that particular technology could handle. One of the samples I love off this campaign is an inline sheet that has coated paper that creates ID cards that are able to be pulled off after you printed the variable data.

Oh, those are like the plastic ones you usually get. Right.

So say you’re at a resort and you need your ID card everywhere you go. This is a prime example of a unique application that you wouldn’t typically find on an inkjet press. Another application in this portfolio is, I do like the menus that we produced. This one was designed for, say, if you have menus out at a poolside bar. So it’s created on a [tesla 00:04:08], resistant to staining and things like that, wet fingers from the poolside.

And I’m assuming that that’s the substrate that would have been difficult in the past to print on inkjet?

Yes. It’s something that no one would have ever thought, early days in, that would ever be possible, and here it is.

And which inkjet was that one printed on?

This one, again, this particular campaign was on our sheet fed series, the I series.

One of the other things I like to talk about. I know this is your favorite, so I saved it. This is our spice of life variety catalog, and really what we love about this, it was showcasing the, again, the variety of applications or papers to create applications that you wouldn’t normally expect from an inkjet press.

And this is all inkjet, right?

Yes, all of these pages are inkjet cover all the way through.

With the foil on it and everything.

So yes, we worked with finishing solutions to add on things like foil or there were some die cutting examples towards the back. So we worked together to create this finished piece. Obviously not all of this was done in line, but it does give you a good feel of how we leveraged the variety of papers and created a real nice look and feel and experience based on the imagery and our capabilities with the substrates.

So that’s one. What I think really just throws everybody off. This is off our color stream. These are variable napkins. So can you imagine printing 2-300 feet a minutes on a roll? On this lightweight paper on a roll? And every Napkin can be unique and different. If you’re at a party event, party-

Events.

Company logos or attendee names-

Annual meetings.

Just thinking you can do napkins on inkjet printing and make it personal-

Think outside the box and make it a napkin.

Another lightweight example on the same continuous feed press is that more lightweight paper that you think of for Bible text weight or pharmaceutical type inserts.

Like the ones that are in the packet, right?

Exactly.

In the box. Okay.

I mean, look, this is so lightweight, again, on a roll of paper. Who would have thought that originally?

Not me.

No one really did. So pushing the boundaries is what we’re really trying to do. And then of course, I think again, going to the heavier substrates. That was also a nirvana, that in the inkjet world we’ve got to get those much heavier weights. And we’re able to do that now on several of our inkjet presses. And then just being able to add in branding or personalization or versioning to any of these applications is possible through inkjet.

What do you think was the most eye opening aspect of our Project Peacock visits from a manufacturer’s point of view?

Just the need, the demand for knowledge. They are excited and they want to learn. They know they need to understand better and just the embracing of us coming in, opening their doors to us, and allowing us that time in their busy schedules to come in and provide just some basic education to help them spark new ideas and provide more value to their clients.

And you also have a unique perspective to talk to printers out there on how they can best communicate with the customers, because we’ve certainly learned a lot about why they won’t talk to them. But why do you think … What are some ways you think would be better for them to approach them? Especially if they have a new technology?

I think we’re helping open the doors to those conversations, and we’re working to understand are there some tools or resources that we can help this communication open for the printers and their clients? So working through books like this, we’re trying to provide resources and tools for the printers so that they can be educated and then pass that education on. But we have opportunities like with Project Peacock where we can, moving down the line, we’re opening up where printers can now come in and have that opportunity to meet firsthand locally in their area with a potential designers’ clients and start those conversations going. It’s not a come in one meeting and, “Oh, you’ve learned everything you need to know, move on.” Again, the technology advances constantly, not just on the inkjet side, on the ink side, the papers, just managing data, how to understand to manage that data, and how do we interpret that on this page and are there ways that we can continue that story using the pages as a ramp off to a digital experience. These are all connected, and so doing things like Project Peacock or future events on the road-

Project Peacock Print Fair.

Yes, exactly. That’s a great way to start making more of those connections, opening those doors, and getting those conversations rolling, and hopefully they will continue the conversations.

And Canon is going to provide a mechanism for getting everybody out there some samples, and awesome, Tanya Powers. You’re the best you.

You are.