Getting Off the Ropes - 09/05

I have been wracking my brain to find a suitable boxing-movie analogy for the beaten-up printing industry and print media in general. The Quiet Man? Rocky V? The Harder They Fall? Cinderella Man? None of them really work. What you need is a plot in which a powerful fighter loses his (or her) confidence in the face of fast and slick competitors, becomes self-conscious and introspective, allows every new bully on the block to pick on him, skulks away rather than retaliates... and finally, finally rises to reassert value, pride and position. Failing the appropriate film analogy, I’ll make my point prosaically. Printing and print media have been under tremendous pressure in the face of new media options, and there is nothing inherently wrong with that. Competition is good, innovation is exciting, alternatives are empowering, things change. On the other hand, much of what passes for “out of the box” new media thinking is superficial and shallow... well, crap. And it has been truly disturbing to watch the immense and gifted print world — imbued with classic strengths and new improvements — fail to fight for its place in the sun.

Blessedly, along comes The Print Council. With a prime directive to promote printing through education, awareness, marketing and advocacy, the council hopes to develop, maintain and increase the market for printed materials. It is heartening to see many of the stalwarts of the industry join the fight, including Agfa, EFI, Heidelberg, Kodak, MAN Roland, RR Donnelley, Xerox and more. A new and notable initiative is focusing on marketing and creative decision-makers. Explains Executive Director Martin Maloney, “By reaching corporate marketers and art directors where they work and live, we’re maximizing the impact [the campaign] will generate.” Thad Kubis of NAK Marketing & Communications, which created the campaign, says it “goes way beyond image advertising. It gives marketers value propositions that involve using print to increase their profits.” The Print Council can be contacted at 203-622-1333 or www.ThePrintCouncil.org.

A New Challenge For Annual Reports

Several of our favorite annual reports are profiled in a special editorial section this month. The annual has always been a strange hybrid — one part financial document, and one part marketing message. In the broad sweep of decades, the opportunity to project a company’s branding message to key audiences has become the dominant focus. Accordingly, as in so many aspects of business and institutional life today, the creative team is ever more important to the process.

Recent events have added yet a new challenge to annual report design and production. Designers Terry Davis and Rob Kennedy of the Atlanta-based see see eye, a design firm with extensive annual report experience, wrote a white paper on the subject that nicely crystallizes the issues. The paper states that “perhaps the two most significant developments that have impacted the annual report are the internet and the collapse of Enron Corporation. The internet, like no other communications medium, continues to feed our ever-growing appetite for instant, timely and thorough information. The demise of Enron, more than any other U.S. public company scandal, set the stage for the eventual passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, forever changing the rigor and process by which public companies prepare, audit and disclose financial information...

“Both the Internet and Sarbanes-Oxley have affected the annual report in ways that expose its underlying strengths and weaknesses. On the strengths side, the annual report is still the one corporate communications document that has the ability to summarize a company’s accomplishments and set forth its vision in a highly believable manner. The CEO letter, the scrutiny the annual receives from accountants and legal counsel, and —of course — those year-end numbers add credibility to the annual and its message in ways that ad campaigns and marketing brochures cannot. Among its weaknesses are the annual report’s significant time and monetary costs. As Sarbanes-Oxley has created tighter time constraints for filing year-end information and has required public companies to disclose even greater amounts of information, companies are looking for ways to minimize their workload, streamline the process and keep production budgets in check.”

The screw tightens, as if you were not already stretched thin. The entire paper, by the way, can be read at www.seeseeeye.com/pages/learn/whitepapers/latest_trends