Inkjet's Age, a print supplement to Quick Printing, is a business and technology brand dedicated to corporate and senior management and focusing on issues surrounding inkjet printing technology in all its forms. Inkjet's Age covers the industry news,
Issue link: https://quickprinting.epubxp.com/i/374926
www.MyPRINTResource.com SEPTEMBER 2014 • INKJET'S AGE 15 ditional offset newspaper presses. They started adding inkjet in 2008 and today operate an HP T230 Color Inkjet Web Press to print a mix of digital and offset newspapers, relying on inkjet for the small runs of foreign language titles for holiday- makers. De Cian said that at present digi- tal accounts for only one to two percent of their total volume, but it's growing, driven largely by applications that mix offset and digital sections. Namely, what De Cian calls "hyperlocal advertising." This is where CSQ's investment in inserting equipment has paid off. "It's very important to have the possibility to do inserting," said De Cian. "We insert hyperlocal [digitally printed sections] in- side the offset product and deliver it to a specific village. It is a hybrid, part is offset, part is digital." The hyperlocal sections contain editorial and advertising unique Hybrid applications can be used to imprint variable lottery num- bers into ads on offset-printed newspaper pages. Newspapers can imprint special access codes or keys to allow users through an online paywall, such as this example from Germany's Bild newspaper, to access special content. ("Tages pass" means "day pass.") to a specific village, town, or other geo- graphical division. It's easy to see that color matching is one of the biggest challenges with this kind of workflow. "It's important to match quality across technologies," said De Cian. "Adver- tisers don't want to see a big difference be- tween the offset part and the digital part." De Cian is happy with the quality of the HP inkjet press, to the point where the de- cision to use offset or digital is decided on a product-by-product basis. "It's a matter of money as well as a matter of time," he said. "We cannot take two hours or three hours." Interactive Advertising Mansfield said that many of Kodak's Prosper customers are overseas newspaper printers using similar hybrid print pro- cesses. "You utilize the best of both worlds," he said. "You're utilizing a traditional newspaper printing workflow for news, for imagery, for editorial, and for most adver- tising, but then you're printing segmented information into that." With the high- speed Prosper printheads, all the custom- ized, segmented information can be printed inline at the same speed as the rest of the paper. "Text, images, anything, at 3,000 feet per minute," said Mansfield. A significant application for this is gam- ing. For newspapers that include them, each issue has a page featuring a numbers game, and each individual copy of an is- sue is imprinted with a different set of numbers, so that each newspaper copy is essentially a lottery ticket. If you have the copy with the winning numbers, you win. And advertising on that gaming page can be sold at a premium since it's a safe bet that that page will be one of the first places a reader turns. Likewise, advertisers also are leveraging this kind of hyper-imprinting to do "inter- active advertising." It works like this: An advertiser takes out an ad and each copy features a different code in the ad. In some cases, the ad is much like a coupon which the user can take down to a retail location to receive a discount or redeem a prize. In others, it features a unique QR (Quick Re- sponse) code or PURL (personalized URL) that the user accesses online. The landing page then can capture all sorts of informa- tion about the user—plugging newspaper readers into the same types of datastreams as direct mail. Kodak offers not only the printing capabilities but also the front-end software to create these kinds of customized applications. Newspapers themselves are also using this type of imprinting to insert custom codes in their own house ads, giving read- ers access to online content that is behind a paywall. Newspaper publishers that want to monetize content regardless of the delivery