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By Kevin Keane, IAPHC CEO Abridged too Far We have published rather lengthy issues of Tuesday Morning News in the recent past. This one will be a bit shorter, and sent to you on a "time-delayed" basis to allow us to focus on International Gallery of Superb Printing marketing efforts. Global Gallery -- Good for Business In last week's International Gallery issue of Tuesday Morning News (TMN) we made the point that entering Gallery can be good for business and that you can obtain business from a far distant client once your capabilities are revealed through your participation in our rapidly growing graphic arts competition. To prove that point, Stan Paterni, of Heartland Paper and president of the Waterloo-Cedar Falls Club in Iowa e-mailed us last week after reading the commentary in TMN on thermochromatic ink as found on a 1999 International Gallery entry submitted by the Portland, Oregon Club on behalf of Pointil Systems, Inc. Stan has a customer interested in the process and Pointil Systems, Inc., may end up with some distant business directly as a result of its entry. Annual Report Pressures A small little enterprise called Zamba which is striving to attain profitability in the field of Customer Care Consulting, writes in its 1998 Annual Report which we suspect was most likely produced on a Xerox DocuTech, as follows: "You will notice this Annual Report and Form 10-K is simple and inexpensive. We are dedicating our marketing and communication investment to our Internet site at www.GoZamba.com Meanwhile the Boston based billion dollar Information Technology firm called Keane, Inc. (no relation to this writer) said last week it was replacing its traditional quarterly mailings to its shareholders with a toll free number. While it hasn't yet replaced the printed annual report one wonders if that could be in the offing. A Digital Sweet Spot Yesterday in London, England and today in Chicago, Illinois, Xerox unveiled its strategy for the new millennium. There is a complete news release available on the Xerox website detailing the specific strategy for the graphic arts. It should be required reading for any one of us involved in this industry. We quote: "The Xerox 1 : 1 Marketing solution draws on company knowledge about customers and prospects to create highly personalized documents. The process uses mined variable information - the portions of a document that can be altered, such as text or graphics - to produce customized pieces within a single print run. Mined information, including demographics and lifestyle, are used to create compelling messages for an audience of one." In other words, a dynamic document. Which is the same type of document we have been railing about in the pages of TMN. We don't think this paradigm shift can be understated. The traditional printed document is static. That is not the future one of our industry's pre-eminent suppliers envisions. Pierre Danon, president of Xerox Europe was interviewed by Reuters yesterday after the London briefing. Speaking of the convergence of information technology, networking and document services, Danon said: "There is a unique sweet spot there. Nobody else is really in it, but they are moving around its edges." We will offer to fax the Xerox news release for the graphic arts segment to anyone who asks, but we will also ask you for a commitment to enter the International Gallery! More Digital Drumbeats 1) Moore Corporation weighed in from Toronto on 22 April with the news that its sales were off $91 million albeit it enjoyed a doubling of net earnings for the first quarter. We would interpret the news to mean that all kinds of printers are being forced to re-think their future. Last year in its news releases Moore would describe itself as the world's largest provider of business forms. Today, it says it: " ....provides products and services to companies through print and digital technologies. As a leading provider of document formatted information, print outsourcing and data-based marketing, Moore designs, manufactures and delivers end-to-end business communications solutions for customers." 2) On 21 April PrintOnTheNet.com of Miami, Florida said it had entered into an agreement with Total Gas and Electric whereby Total's marketing department can use a secure web folder to modify, proof and order printed materials directly through an Internet-connected personal computer. Total is an independent gas and electricity supplier in the Northeast part of the United States. 3) On 23 April Deluxe Check announced a restructuring plan. Check printing and other paper payment systems will still make up 75% of Deluxe's revenue generating operations, but the firm has obviously placed its bets on a new subsidiary called eFunds. Said CEO Gus Blanchard: "This is a set of changes that will enable us to be a much more influential player in some of the fastest growing markets in the United States, e-commerce, the use of the Internet and a lot of electronic businesses that represent just a huge growth opportunity." 4) Sir Speedy has entered into an agreement with Instant Documents which says it is the first secure worldwide electronic and printed document delivery service, go to www.instantdocuments.com Intriguingly, the VP of Sales for Instant Documents is a gentleman who had been employed by ImageX.com an e-commerce virtual printing company based in Seattle, Washington which we have written about previously in TMN. Consolidation Conga Line Is everybody doing it? Last week, we mentioned that Consolidated Graphics was acquiring The Printery in Milwaukee, Wisconsin; today the firm announced it had also signed a letter of intent to acquire Westland Printers of Baltimore, Maryland. Also today, IPI, Inc., parent company of the Insty-Prints quick printing franchise announced it had purchased the business assets of Regency Plaza Printing in Dallas, Texas effective 23 April. Meanwhile, a little earlier this month, ImageX.com acquired Fine Arts graphics a 70 year old firm with plants in Portland, Oregon and Union, New Jersey. Fine Arts specializes in high end printing with special emphasis on engraving, embossing and thermography. It will be run as an ImageX.com subsidiary. Apparently this consolidation craze agrees with some of the firms doing it. Yesterday, Cunningham Graphics International, Inc., said its revenues for the first quarter were up 69 percent and its net income increased 166 percent. In last week's TMN we mentioned that Cunningham had recently taken over operation of an in-plant shop. That shop turns out to be PaineWebber's in house plant. We bet that shop turns out a few impressions. Other Industry Tidbits PrimeSource Corporation had done a bit of consolidation of its own on the supply side of our industry, and it seems to have been a good move for the company. On 22 April it announced that sales jumped 37 percent over the same quarter last year and net income had also improved. PrimeSource now provides more than 50,000 different products from 500 different manufacturers. It has 30,000 customers being serviced from 32 distribution centers. John Walter former CEO of R. R. Donnelley and Sons Co., who then parachuted safely out of the top job at AT &T with a cool $26 million, has finally landed as CEO of Manpower, Inc. We still recall the description of Mr. Walter applied by the Wall Street Journal when it became known he was leaving the printing industry for AT & T -- 'a giant among midgets.' Grrrrr! Adobe Systems introduced its newest version of Adobe Type Manager Deluxe (v4.5) for the Macintosh on 26 April. BCT International (Business Cards Tomorrow) announced that Peter Gaughn, who had been CEO of BCT before departing in 1995 to become President of the PIP quick printing chain was returning to BCT again as CEO effective 26 April. We received an e-mail from a gent named Steven Walker from the United Kingdom who is marketing a colour reference book called The Tint File which shows over 20,000 printed tints made up from CMYK.
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