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Google Print: Printers Move to Build
Google-Like Scale for Custom Publishing |
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15 February 2007 |
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As in publishing the printing business has been undergoing
quite a bit of consolidation and scaling lately, creating
ever-larger printing conglomerates focused on higher
margins and revenues. The key to their improved economic
performance will be "short run" printing for customers
wanting to reach highly targeted markets with customized
messaging. What will happen when the economies of mass
customized printing are married with the source-agnostic
aggregation of today's Web? Call it Google Print - and call
it the next major challenge facing today's publishers. |
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There's a certain amount
of pride in the print trade: as Robert Burton, CEO of
Cenveo, Inc., pointed out
in a recent
analyst call on their acquisition of
Cadmus Communications
Corporation, "Cenveo's a printer, we're not trying to be
like an impostor like a lot of printing companies are saying
they're not a printer...going out buying companies that have
nothing to do with printing...we are going to stay loyal to
that theme." To a company that's closing in on the USD 2
billion annual revenue mark through a strong string of
acquisitions - and aiming for 3 billion - the mystique of print
lives on and is aiming for higher heights.
Cenveo's aiming to reach those heights through focusing more
on "short-run" printing, more niche-oriented and specialty runs
that have better margins and higher customer satisfaction.
These goals fit in nicely for an acquisition like Cadmus, which
plays a strong role in printing, packaging, and relicensing
content from scholarly journals and other key publishing
segments. As publishers focus more on electronic markets those
with only nominally scaled printing operations are turning to
companies like Cadmus and Cenveo to take over their printing
needs, as in Cadmus' recently
announced acquisition of the printing operations of
LexisNexis. This is placing more power in the hands of large
specialists in content remarketing and repackaging for print to
feed value-add revenues to their editorial operations.
Specialty printing and reprinting services are becoming
increasingly important hubs for marketers trying to connect
with their markets in more focused and valuable contexts. In
the short run this has been good news for publishers: revenues
from reprinting and relicensing are starting to form a regular
flow of cash that is helping to support their core
publishing operations.
But just as Google has begun to skim off significant ad
dollars through source-agnostic search results, there's a
danger in using a channel that's more adept at building
high-margin solutions for your key clients in highly focused
contexts. Put simply, what happens when content generated via
specialty printing and repurposing becomes more interesting to
audiences than magazines and journals?
This may seem a little far-fetched at this point in time,
but it's really not that distant a thing to consider. Already
revenues from content relicensing and reprinting are far from
ancillary for many publishers. At the same time, brand
advertising is starting to move away from traditional
"long-run" print publications and online portals and towards
private-label publications and brand-centric online content
collections such as with Yahoo's "brand
universe" mini-sites. With all of this migration of
marketing dollars, it seems that there's probably yet another
chapter to be written in the story of print-based marketing.
And that chapter is likely to be entitled "Google Print."
Google may not in fact be the one to write this chapter, but
it will provide the model for the next chapter in print
publishing regardless of who actually seizes the model. Google
popularized the concept of aggregating content from whatever
source served a very specific interest. Every search result on
Google became in effect a custom publication. Once ads were
added to the mix, you had infinite page inventory meeting
infinitely tunable message marketing for an infinite galaxy of
search results (read: custom publications). Google kept
focusing relentlessly on providing infrastructure scaled to
perform this trick for more content and more ads than any one
else. So the question becomes: why wouldn't Google or a
similarly positioned company decide to use print as a new
delivery medium for ad-supported, user-aggregated content?
Make no mistake about it, the day of Google Print will be
upon us far faster than most publishers think. Audiences will
select their own batches of content that they'd like to license
in print form and marketers will help pay for those batches
with highly tuned custom print marketing campaigns. Today
people trundle down to the mailbox or driveway to pick up a
dose of print news for relaxed reading that's been selected by
newspaper and magazine editors. Tomorrow they'll be picking up
content that they've selected themselves or that's been
selected across numerous publications by "concierges" such as
search engines and trusted webloggers. Print won't die: instead
it will be reborn as a mass customized product.
There will be a few key winners in this new mix:
- Printers. In many instances publishers are no
longer able to get the margins that they require to support
"long run" print publications effectively with in-house
printing. The recent round of consolidations via acquisitions
have eased this problem somewhat, but the fundamental
economic model for most "one ad fits all" print publications
is broken. Source-agnostic printers scaling up for
highly efficient aggregation and distribution will become the
new Googles of print and create an exciting new world of
highly tuned, high-margin personal publications.
- "Googles." Printers are scaling for these
opportunities, but most large printers lack the vision to
even begin thinking of these opportunities. Expect a company
like Google or Amazon to acquire a major printing operation
in the next year or so to begin developing the vision to
match the scale.
- Starbucks. The other side of the mass
customization is highly localized production. People are
paying three dollars or more for a cup of coffee at outlets
like Starbucks that they could have picked up elsewhere for a
dollar or less: why wouldn't they pay for a custom newspaper
in a similar outlet for a similar price? With on-demand
printing becoming scalable for retail-level use expect new
combinations of retail and publishing to create exciting new
custom print publishing opportunities.
With companies like Cadmus that know how to repurpose
content effectively and publishers becoming more adept at
developing content that's repurposable from day one expect mass
custom publishing to become the center of print publishing
revenues over the next five to ten years - and expect the move
towards that mix to begin far sooner than that. No offense to
eInk and other emerging
technologies, but there's probably the better part of a century
left in good old print - when it gets married to Google
economics.
-
John Blossom
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