Emerging Technologies Keep the Print Industry On Top

Print has a long history. Perfected and ready for commercial use in 1450, the Gutenberg press owed much to the medieval paper press, which was modeled after the ancient wine-and-olive press of the Mediterranean area. Picture the first press operators using a long handle to crank a heavy wooden screw, exerting downward pressure against the paper that was placed over the type mounted on a wooden plate. The wooden press reigned supreme for more than 300 years, and had a rate of about 250 sheets per hour printed on one side.

Using print as a practice to sell things also emerged in the mid-fifteenth century. The earliest surviving printed advertisement in English is said to be an ad for a newly printed book. In 1476, Britain’s first printer produced not just the manual for priests called Sarum Pie, but easily portable, playing card-sized advertisements for the book, as well.

The printing press and subsequent technological advances related to paper manufacturing and distribution led to the establishment of print as the first mass medium. And despite the advent of many other forms of mass media, print is still a reigning champion as a channel for information and promotion.

After the U.S. postal system was established in 1775, it took several decades before the brilliance of combining print and mail took hold. The American Anti-Slavery Society printed and mailed marketing materials to religious and civic leaders in the South in 1835. This is likely the first direct mail campaign. They created a mailing list from public sources like names in newspapers and city directories.

Many retailers and service providers started using “circulars” as a mail order marketing strategy to develop their sales efforts in the 1860s. Here are some of the other early direct mail marketing participants:

• The New York Life Insurance Company began direct mailings as early as 1872.
• That same year, Montgomery Ward and Company became the first mail-order business to make a fortune through retail sales, beginning with a simple one-page catalog featuring 163 items.
• Soon after Montgomery Ward’s success, Sears began mailing flyers for watches to rural customers. These flyers evolved into 500-page catalogs that shipped to more than 300,000 homes. This process revolutionized how to buy goods. No matter where they lived, customers could be contacted directly to buy products.
• The National Cash Register Company was also enamored with direct mail, dispatching almost four million pieces of printed material to prospects in the late 1800s.
• The Book-of-the-Month Club began in 1926.

Today, we have over 40,000 post offices, and the postal service delivers more than 200 billion pieces of mail each year to over 144 million homes and businesses nationwide.

You may think high-tech is for other industries and not much has changed with print since the earliest days of the print and direct mail boom, but not so fast – as high-tech advances have spread across the business spectrum over the past several decades, the printing industry is one of its many beneficiaries.

We’ve compiled a list of a few notable technological advancements in print worth mentioning:

Alignment advancements
Front-to-back registration is complicated, time-consuming and tricky for even the savviest print operators. Today, advanced passes can perform this once manual routine in either a fully automatic or semi-automatic way.

Automation
Automation is revolutionizing printing and removing countless human-led errors that impact throughput and profit margins.

Color and toner technology
Automatic color technology can make a huge difference to bottom lines and finished products. New tech now checks for stability and density, and the new generation of toner uses emulsion aggregation to lower costs, sharpen image quality and reduce energy usage.

Digital print
The digital world creates a fresh set of variables for printing with new ways of production, color management enhancement, the requirement of more sophisticated management of information, consideration for DPI resolution and extended color gamut, and variations in press speeds with high-speed digital print on demand.

Exact reproduction
While four-color print has been around for over 100 years, today’s advanced technology allows us to end up with much sharper images with far more capability to reproduce exactly what the job requires.

Faster presses
Speeds of up to 100 ppm can now be achieved with the new generation of presses – even with card stocks or coated paper.

 Image enhancing
Formerly, you’d have to source optimum quality photos for every print job, but with new presses that offer built-in tools for image enhancement, the printer can automatically improve lower quality imagery. Brightness and color adjustments can also be made by the print devices themselves on the fly, resulting in a higher quality print every time.

Workflows
New print technology enables us to automate workflows that were previously carried out manually, executing complex jobs and automating the entire process so the job completes perfectly.

Getting “phygital”
Electronic paper and digitization have not hampered the development of technological innovations in the printing industry. In fact, the confluence of print with digital platforms ushered in tools like QR codes and augmented reality, bridging the two mediums.

Direct mailing gains
Direct mail is more sophisticated than ever with advancements in tracking, informed delivery and targeting. Today, data mining and modeling net lists that are monumentally specific, zeroing in on the most ideal targets.

Print Drives America continues their promotions of print with their ads, appearing in a Wall Street Journal national edition story. “PRINT IS HI-TECH” explains that print today harnesses the best marketing technology that precisely targets recipients. Files for the ads are available to all – printers, vendors and publications. The ads may be customized with their own company signatures. Visit pialliance.org/print-drives-america-foundation/ to download files. Posters and mailing pieces are also available.

The takeaway
Technology is indeed a boon to the printing industry. Without it, we wouldn’t have the progress that we continue to enjoy. It is technology that brings us digital printing, ground-breaking inkjet systems, mass customization, novel substrates and state-of-the-art finishing. As the print industry continues to evolve and change to meet new demands, it brings more variables and even more printing options and advancements.

New print technology can completely change your business and elevate your selling success by expanding your offering and giving you a competitive edge. What are your competitors doing with print? Are they embracing new technology? Navitor’s innovations allow our distributor partners to be smarter, leaner and more productive. And the best news? It isn’t technology for its own sake – these are practical solutions that will help you get ahead and conquer the diverse challenges of the digital age.