During the opening session of the ad:tech New York show recently, ad:tech Chairman Drew Ianni warned nearly 13,000 attendees that the event would be a "tight squeeze" in the Hilton Hotel.
"He wasn't kidding," attendee Rebecca Lieb posted later that morning on the ClickZ News Blog. "I'm at a session now at which over half the audience is forced to either stand or sprawl on the floor…Everywhere you go, you feel like you're trying to squeeze in the same room with all of them."
Lieb was at the largest show in the history of ad:tech, a series of conferences that showcases trends in the interactive marketing industry. The shows, held annually in New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Miami, London, Paris, Hamburg, Shanghai, Singapore and Sydney, explore how marketing and technology intersect. They're lively, fun and fascinating.
And practically void of printing pros!
This shouldn't be the case. Marketers and media managers need creative, effective ways to attract specific audiences at a time when grabbing anyone's attention is harder than ever. They have a wide choice of new-media options—email, Web sites, blogs, podcasts—and many of them (especially younger ones) don't immediately think of ways to utilize print. They can leverage the power of audio and video without buying a single minute of satellite, online media or television airtime. To a significant extent, these are the same folks who will control how much marketing-based printing is produced in the future. And they're literally sprawling at events such as ad:tech.
But we're not there.
We're not on panels, discussing print's role in tomorrow's communications marketplace. We're not on the show floor, exhibiting digital print's ability to help marketers segment audiences and customize messages. We're not on sponsorship banners, investing in a memorable presence. And so, too often, we're not on the radar screens of designers, agencies, public relations firms, content creators and other new-media pros, all of whom tend to marginalize print's critical function. Read commentary: http://adtechblog.com.
Print companies need be part of the discussion of how people can more effectively communicate in the digital world. We should be eager to put the glories of print on display, revealing how cross-media strategies should only include print, but often be driven by it. We should take notes at ad:tech sessions such as "The Anywhere Consumer," at which Yankee Group Research CEO Emily Green examined the type of client who expects all activities, preferences and information to be available wherever, whenever and on whatever screen (or gadget) is most convenient. (Check out
www.ad-tech.com/ny.asp.)
It's up to us to show how print can make other media more effective. To gain credibility, we should be using new media ourselves. Yes, our technical ability to put ink on paper is still vital. And yes, we ought to love the image of a press operator getting his hands dirty. But we also need to understand the nuances of the creative economy, where the most valuable currency is innovation.
"In 1996, a common belief was that the Internet infrastructure would one day not be able to handle the load and would crash," noted Kevin Ryan, CEO of comparative shopping search engine Shopwiki.com and former CEO of DoubleClick, during his keynote at ad:tech New York. "In just 10 years, online ad revenue went from $270 million to more than $12 billion."
But that doesn't augur the end of print. Today's converging-media marketplace is rife with opportunities for printing firms to bring eye-opening solutions to clients. Attending shows such as ad:tech, and learning more about the how printing, marketing and technology intersect, will boost your company's bottom line and help advance the role of print.