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Quick Printing | January 2015 15 MyPRINTResource.com Coasters are another popular ad specialty item, although whether someone wants to put a glass down on a family member's face may be a question for one's therapist. There is virtually no limit to the types of products that can be considered an "ad specialty." Hold on tightly and fasten your seatbelts as digital printing and web-to-print technologies disrupt yet another traditional supply chain. By Richard Romano R each into your cup of writing instruments and pull out a pen at random. The chances are quite good that it will have a logo on it—a logo, that is, for a business other than the manufacturer of the pen. Indeed, those of us who travel frequently tend to have an array of pens with hotel brands emblazoned on them. Pens are perhaps the most obvious example of a unique niche in the printing industry: ad specialties. A glance around your offce or home will turn up many more exam- ples: thumb drives, coffee mugs, refrigerator magnets, golf balls, T-shirts and other garments, and infnitely more. The Ad Specialties Institute defnes these items as "low- cost, high-return promotional products, or ad specialties, are usually given away for free by companies, schools, hospitals, sports teams, organizations, and more to adver- tise a brand or event or to thank employees or clients." We sometimes call these promotional merchandise, or perhaps widgets or doodads, or even tschotchkes. If you walk any trade show foor, you'll fnd yourself accumulating many of these objects, and even wearing them: lanyards are also a popular ad specialty item. The ad specialties industry has had a traditional man- ufacturing and distribution supply chain structure, but digital printing technology, as in so many other corners of the printing industry, is disrupting that structure. The Layers of the Golf Ball Golf balls are a popular specialty print product, so this metaphor is apt. If you were to slice a golf ball in half, you'd see several distinct layers. A cross section of the ad specialties distribution model also shows several distinct layers: § Manufacturer—the company that manufactures the physical item, such as a pen. § Supplier—the company (B2B) that orders a quantity of specialty-printed items from the manufacturer, such as 500 pens with, say, the Quick Printing logo on them. Rules of Thumb (Drives): The Changing Nature of Ad Specialties § Distributor—the company (also B2B) that carries a number of different specialty product lines and liaises with the end user to to acquire those 500 custom-print- ed pens. § End User—the individual or the company that wants the 500 printed pens to distribute. It works like this. "Coca-Cola has a big event and they have some branded products they want to give away," said C.J. Mittica, editor of Wearables magazine, an ASI publication. "They contact their distributor who they work with and they then fgure out the items they think would be most effective. The distributor contacts the supplier who is essentially the manufacturer of the product. If it's a T-shirt, the distributor gets in touch with a T-shirt supplier." The T-shirt supplier is the one who does the customized printing, and may also be ordering blank products from their own supplier—the manufacturer in the list above. Distributors also provide promotional product consul- tants who work with the end user (a business or orga-