A German project called Niiu (translated as ‘new’) has become the first commercial model of a ‘youspaper’, allowing subscribers to pre-select a basket of news pages – complete with advertising – from a consortium of some 30 mastheads, including the New York Times, International Herald Tribune and Germany’s Bild. 

The venture, which has amassed 4,500 subscribers, uses Océ’s JetStream high-volume digital inkjet to produce the 24-38pp publication. 

So we know how the newspaper is printed, but what about the real black magic? What goes on behind the curtain? The secret to personalisation is managing the data right.

In variable-data print (VDP), data is king. During a recent visit to Australia to promote the JetStream range, Océ’s Robert Koeckeis emphasised that its partner in Niiu is a data management company, which draws a portion of the sales revenue and has advertising sales rights in the paper – all of which is taken as a fee for its services. The newspaper is printed by partner sites in Océ’s Digital Newspaper Network.

One company that has placed a great deal of emphasis on data management is Fergies Print & Mail in Brisbane. Chief executive Richard Sloan says Fergies attracts and holds print customers by offering them ‘data mining’ services that open “an unsurpassed window” into the inventories of their own customers, as well as their own inventories and store lifecycles. The upshot, he says, is that Fergies clients can maximise revenue, minimise expense and manage best practice (see Star Business, p26).

Marketed by Fergies as its data intelligence tool, the ‘OneView’ service uses software tools such as XMPie, Print Shop Mail and SQL. The service offers what Sloan calls “demographic and socio-graphic information” that enables clients to reduce wastage in DM campaigns and create targeted messages based on where their target is in their buying lifecycle, and sent at times when purchase intentions are highest.

“Almost every organisation has more than one database. In fact, most have more than five,” says Sloan. “These don’t or can’t talk to each other so the data on your most valuable resource, your customers, can’t be linked. So how can you use this to market the right product to the right customer? We can help consolidate many databases, cleansing, segmenting and mining them to find markets, without any impost to our client’s IT department or the need to purchase any software.”

Data mining

Looking at the benefits Fergies gets from data mining, Sloan sees it as the ability to offer an end-to-end service, from offset printing of collaterals, to personalisation of  documents, to distribution. 

“Without these additional services and now the move into database hosting, cleansing and mining services, we would be very vulnerable in today’s marketplace,” adds Sloan.

Satellite Digital is a five-year-old digital business based in Sydney spun off from sheetfed printer Rawson Graphics. It specialises in commercial digital printing, but also VDP work, on its HP Indigo 7000, which has an expandable RIP platform, so it can be adapted to a wide range of VDP. Satellite Digital occasionally adds digital overprints to offset shells provided by Rawson.

Paul Culliver, Satellite Digital’s director, says its VDP starts from basic jobs such as versioned promotional postcards for pharmacies, where runs are printed from a sizeable database and the name of the pharmacy is in a variable field. 

Culliver estimates there to be some 20 of these a week. There might not be much data on clients, but these jobs are good data ‘magnets’ – and can be linked to a cross-media application with questionnaires for gathering more customer intel for future use.

At the other end of the spectrum are jobs (typically for financial institutions and telcos) that carry a lot of data, where each image field is fully variable, depending on age, gender, product
and date of purchase.

In terms of using the software, the pharmacy job and similar jobs are quite simple, says Culliver, with the client supplying the art, the data and the selection of fields they want personalised.

“It’s basically just using the rules within the software provided by HP to vary the single image produced by the Indigo. With the highly personalised ones, normally they’re short runs. We’ll do a high degree of manipulation within Excel to create some of the rules we need that can’t be created within the VDP software, these rules will then be input into the software, and it produces the print file. 

“The rule-creating is the tough bit. All the other stuff, if you’ve done it once, then it’s relatively easy,” says Culliver.

But there are no silver bullets with VDP – and every new job brings a degree of difficulty that creates new conditions that are fed back into the knowledge base at Satellite Digital. The company is training a pre-press specialist for VDP. 

“A lot of what we’re teaching him is what he’s already learned for more basic VDP jobs, but in a slightly different light.” This full-time operator is Satellite Digital’s human resources investment in VDP, but Culliver says there is a back-up person, and other Satellite Digital staff have been cross-trained.

Low-end VDP

Print City, a mixed offset and digital business in Melbourne’s CBD, started VDP with offset-shell overprints. It has since invested in XMPie and in training some of its staff. It limits itself to low-end variable jobs such as credit vouchers and wedding invitations. 

Manager Mason Thomas has deliberately stayed clear of higher-end transactional work because of the physical space needed to set up for that.

Its city location draws in a lot of word-of-mouth traffic, much of it repeat business for VDP. Thomas says VDP has become more popular with the rising quality of data delivery and the corresponding reduction in spoils. He estimates a fifth of Print City’s VDP clients have been upsold from static print work. “You’d be surprised how much business comes to us from temps who move from business to business bringing us new clients all the time.”

Response rates are the selling point – and Satellite Digital’s sales reps point out the difference between an inkjet-on-offset pre-print mailer, which can yield 0.5%, to a fully variable hit at around 5%-6%. The occasional job will exceed these in multiples, but these are rare, says Culliver. “It’s the old rule that with a mail piece, you have four seconds to make an impact. We’re aiming for a situation where the recipient’s suddenly holding on to it for 20 seconds and reading it.”

Vary the mix

Sales reps will typically offer a client an assortment of a basic inkjet overprint, some VDP, all the way to fully variable, then on repeat business, will vary the mix, according to how successful it was.

Culliver finds that high-end VDP projects create a bond with his clients. “There’s a lot more traditional-style approach, not unlike the way a litho job used to be planned. You used to sit down with the binder and the printer, the designer and the customer, and make up the project. That has to happen again on VDP jobs to get the best out what the client wants. A lot of the time the client will come up with an unworkable concept and we have to say ‘yes, it will or no, it won’t work’.” 

So ironically, bleeding-edge 21st-century VDP has brought printers and their customers face-to-face across a table again.

Comment below to have your say on this story.

If you have a news story or tip-off, get in touch at editorial@sprinter.com.au.  

Sign up to the Sprinter newsletter