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Newspapers Can Still Remain Relevant for Readers and Advertisers

April 17, 2008 One of Jerry Seinfeld’s quotable observations was, “It’s amazing that the amount of news that happens in the world every day always just exactly fits the newspaper.”

Indeed.

Yet I just spent four days in Washington, DC, at the Newspaper Association of America’s NEXPO Capital Conference, held April 12–16, which is the annual conference for the newspaper industry. The theme of this year’s show was relevance, both in terms of making print relevant to the changing demands of media consumers, and making the news in general relevant to an audience that is less and less interested in it. That is, with more and more eyeballs and ad dollars going online, paper and printing costs going up, and wholesale changes in the way people interact with news and information, the amount of newspaper that publishers can afford to print is increasingly smaller than the amount of news that happens in the world. Sorry, Jerry.

However, this is a blog about marketing, so let’s not use this venue to bemoan the state of the newspaper industry. Instead, it bears mentioning that there are technologies afoot that are changing the way that newspapers can interact with potential readers—and how advertisers can avail themselves of new ways of reaching news readers.

One emerging trend in the newspaper may be of interest to my co-blogger, Heidi Tolliver-Nigro, who, after all, is our variable-data printing maven. This trend is “personalized newspapers.” Wha?

Indeed:

A NEXPO panel entitled, “New Technologies: Digital Printing” put forth the proposition that the cure for the ills of newspaper industry may very well be the same as that which helped revive the printed direct mail business: the application of inkjet and other digital printing technologies. Al Miller, of press manufacturer MAN Roland, discussed how newspapers can incorporate elements such as personalization, customization, and variable-data printing. For example:

• newspaper advertisers can test different ad variations in different copies of the same “issue”;
• advertisers can add maps to local retail outlets or car dealerships, and other things that fall under the rubric of “microzoning” (that is, customizing and personalizing newspapers geographically to have relevance for subscribers);
• different Sudoku grids could appear in different copies of the same newspaper, theoretically encouraging hardcore Sudoku players to buy multiple copies.

As a result, technologies such as Kodak’s Continuous Inkjet (CIJ) system can be installed on MAN’s newspaper presses and variable inkjetted material can be generated on the fly.

This may not entirely please newspaper press manufacturers, but one of the Holy Grails of this session pointed to the wholesale inkjetting of entire newspapers. It has already been done; Duncan Newton, representing digital press manufacturer Océ, passed around a demo copy of USA Today that had been printed on newsprint entirely on an Océ inkjet printer. To my eyes, it was virtually indistinguishable from a conventionally printed newspaper. The challenges to inkjet printing are speed, as well as computing power—a newspaper-sized press needs a lot of nozzles each of which needs to be individually addressed, multiplied by four if you want CMYK. At the same time, the high absorbency of newsprint makes it difficult to print water-based inkjet inks without causing blurring and puckwering of the paper. But many of these issues are close to being resolved.

One an entire newspaper can be printed on a digital press, that opens up whole new possibilities for 1:1 personalized newspapers—that is, newspapers that can be individually tailored for specific readers. And one application of this approach is that one’s newspaper can follow them when they travel. For example, say a newspaper subscriber lives in New York but winters in Florida. All he needs to do is tell his newspaper where he’ll be wintering, and that paper can be printed in Florida instead of New York and delivered to the snowbird residence’s front door as early as it had been delivered at home. If you are a Florida advertiser, you can reach a new set of potentially receptive newspaper readers.

It sounds like science-fiction (OK, maybe kind of dull science-fiction), but we’re not far from away from such  applications. And tomorrow, I’ll present the results of a Google study that reinforced the need to keep print—and printed newspapers—as part of the marketing mix.

Posted by Richard Romano on April 17, 2008 | Comments (1)