Drupa has generally failed to attract the ultimate influencers of what is printed, how and where. These are the directors, the senior vice presidents and CEOs of publishing companies, marketing and advertising agencies and leaders of FMCG brands. So when Ogilvy & Mather vice chairman Rory Sutherland was invited to give a keynote presentation at the Drupa Cube, it was almost mould breaking.
His presentation was centred on print in marketing, more accurately print’s forgotten role in marketing. For as he told the audience nobody is questioned when following the latest fashions. And the current fashion is for all things digital. That current fashion is wrong he said, because digital messaging is all about marketing efficiency – it is fast and easy to distribute a message via email, SMS or social media – rather than marketing effectiveness. He quoted the late Dave Abbott who said “that shit that arrives at the speed of light is still shit.”
The big problem with digital messaging he explained amounts to the fact that it works as intended, gaining responses and clicks from the people that are apt to do this: this amounts to a dwindling pool to fish in. To grow, a business needs to market to a new audience and that is not online.
“A lot of digital is very clever, but not as clever as it looks,” he says. “Because the cost is low it suggests efficiency, but that does not translate into effectiveness.” It is a mistake to think that these are essentially the same, that because it’s efficient it must be effective. “Even if the message is the same in print and digital and the cost of digital is less, it does not mean you have become more efficient a person,” and launched into a comparison between a wedding invitation sent as an email and another for the same day sent as a card invitation.
The invitation in print will win out, “and the email wedding will also have a cash bar”.
There is merit too in doing the opposite of what everybody is doing because it will achieve greater cut through. He used statistics from ThinkBox, an organisation which promotes the use of broadcast televisions as an advertising channel.
This showed that direct mail has the greatest return per £1 spent of any channel, both in the immediate and long term. “The reason that direct mail is so effective is that nobody else is doing it. It is successful in inverse proportion to how fashionable it is.”
Because print is relatively slow and expensive, it is valued by those receiving it. And this increases the likelihood of positive action.
At the extreme Sutherland mentioned a company called Inkpact which uses teams of home workers to copy printed out thank you messages from large companies in their own handwriting and then inserting these in envelopes and posting them to highly valued customers.
When Bang & Olufson tried an offer of a free bluetooth speaker to high worth customers using email, the take up was minimal. When the same offer was made by direct mail, the take up was 63% and would have probably been higher had the agency known which country and which of their properties the family was in at the time.
In nature this is called costly signalling. The perfect example is the peacock; there being no logical reason for the tail display, except to show the female that the male bird is worth getting to know. The driver of a luxury car is engaged in the same signalling process – why else possess a Ferrari in central London?
Foiling and spot varnishing perform the same purpose on printed packaging, conferring a luxury look and feel to what might otherwise be an ordinary product. Sutherland had spent time with Scodix at the show, learning how a little touch of foil on a box “massively increases the perceived value of the contents”.
That association works well with other quality brands. “There is no digital medium that replicates the back page of Vogue,” he said. This is where print excels, not in blanket direct mail of the kind that dominated the last decade of the millennium, but by delivering high value messaging to select customers. A profiled audience means less wastage in the message delivered. Consequently the tighter the audience the message can have greater value. “If you have a B2B audience of 500, you can send them something that they can’t ignore,” said Sutherland.
When walking around the show later, he was impressed with the EFI/Packsize display producing highly decorated personalised corrugated boxes on the fly. And later in an impromptu meeting with Benny Landa was equally enthused by the potential of creating magazine style products with a number of ads matched to the profile of the reader.
This is very different from Sutherland’s own experience when after buying some Wolford tights for his daughter’s school uniform, he was pursued by ads for the same product on every website he visited for the next few months. In the old media world, he said, pre internet, readers would see a cross section of different ads, perhaps a few more for luxury brands. “But in the digital world, at the level of the overall systems, everybody is not seeing a cross section of ads, but rather advertising seems to be working through mindless repetition,” he said.
Print has the impact that this kind of digital advertising lacks. Sutherland’s children are now in their 20s. “If they get direct mail, it’s the most exciting impactful communication they get all month,” he says. “Print is so effective because it’s so unfashionable and is therefore under used.” Print, in short, should be part of every media schedule.
