Hotcards, Full Color Printing In The Nation

Using jumbo print ads to combat the recession.

There are few things more visually depressing than a business district turning into a ghost town. Empty storefronts, faded, torn posters billowing in the wind, dust and grime encrusting windows that once shone with the promise of consumer bliss.

Over the last year or so, this has become a too-common sight in towns and cities all over the world. And the worst part is that the cycle is depressingly self-perpetuating: when businesses start to close, it leads to other businesses closing, whether because of the decrease in area traffic, or because the business itself doesn't want to cling to a sinking ship.

Knowing well the nature of the beast, the city council of North Tyneside, England, has decided to take a radical approach. Instead of letting their shrinking business district go gray and seedy (140 shops have closed in the city, recently), the council has begun to print storefronts.

The vinyl building wraps, each costing about 1500 British pounds, are designed to depict the front of an attractive, bustling business. Not only do the fake storefronts cheer up the neighborhood, the city council is hoping they will encourage prospective business owners to invest.

Magazines, you're making a scene…

"This business is perfectly legitimate." "All my transactions are totally on-the-level, completely above-board." "Trust me, baby. Would I lie to you?" "I am 100% confident that this is the edgiest new product on the market." "I know your part seems small, but it's really important."

What do all these lines have in common? The fact that they are never true, and that just speaking the words actually serves to render them less true. For example, if a business is "legitimate" you don't need to call it "legitimate." If a person is actually trustworthy, they don't need to say "trust me." We've all dealt with people who love to throw around this type of language, but it never gets more believable.

Unfortunately, these are the one-liners brought to mind by the new "Magazines, The Power of Print" campaign announced last week by a group of five major magazine publishers. The focus of the campaign is to remind advertisers, shareholders, and "industry influencers" of the fact that people still engage with print. Unfortunately, the campaign comes off much like calling a product "edgy" or a business "on-the-level." If print was actually still relevant, the reader thinks, it wouldn't need to insist on it.

There's a right way, and a wrong way, of posing the question…

At a time when the print industry is supposed to be either fading gracefully or balling up – turtle style – in the hopes of coming out of this recession alive, Fortune Magazine is doing the unthinkable. It's – gasp! – redesigning.

One of Time Inc.'s major newsstand players, Fortune is coming out this month with a whole new look, and we're not talking leaner, meaner, and cheaper. The Fortune redesign involves the addition of relevant new sections, as well as heavier paper stock, and a matte, rather than gloss finish, for the cover. To wit, Fortune has redesigned up, creating a more expensive-to-produce magazine...

And it's not pretty.

Sad news today from Oberlin, Ohio. The World Color Press plant, located in Oberlin, is closing. 119 printing employees will be out of a job as of May 21st. The line of reasoning sent down from World Color's head office is simple and one we hear too often lately: the economy is bad, we all have to make tough decisions.

The plant shutdown comes on the heels of Quad/Graphics acquisition of World Color (formerly Quebecor World Inc.) in January. While World Color reps call the closure unrelated, you don't have to be a genius to figure out that the multinational company is cleaning house and cutting costs where they can.

Direct mail and magazine insert printing done by the Oberlin plant will be transferred to other World Color branches, and employees will be notified of openings at other locations. Unfortunately, in this economy, we all know what that means.

Frustrations aside, however, the modus operandi of all large printing companies has been the same since the recession began: consolidate, trim the fat, lower expenses. As major forces in the printing industry begin to prepare for the trade show season, many, such as Heidelberg and Komori, are scaling down, choosing to market themselves in less expensive ways rather than invest in a costly trade show expo.

The irony here, of course, is that if printers won't invest in print, then who will? Shutting down small plants and shunning trade shows can be viewed as basic self-preservation tactics, designed to ensure the industry's future, but ultimately, these stop-gaps can neither be called innovative solutions or creative developments. This type of defensive maneuver only works for weathering a temporary storm, not revitalizing an industry.

The Oberlin World Color plant has been a leader in instituting green technologies, and cutting costs in the process. That's the kind of smart, forward thinking that printers need to survive, and yet, it's being crushed by corporate bottom lines. If the game plan according to major players is to stamp out innovation in favor of self-preservation, then maybe this industry, at least so far as the old way of doing business is concerned, doesn't deserve to survive.

Adventures in brand diplomacy.

Through cold, through ice, through recession, the tradition of epic Olympic games print advertising prevails! The Olympics is always a hugely busy time for printers, as print advertisers – often with very different agendas – compete for attention on the world stage.

First, there’s the official Olympic committee stuff – the mascots, the slogans - but most of all the carefully designed winter Olympic poster, from which springs all other print collateral and represents the very soul of a nation.

This winter in Vancouver, the green and blue maple leaf, shot through with scenes depicting the Canadian wilderness, has fans and critics. For some, the symbolism is too obscure, while others criticize it as being overworked.

It seems that at the Olympics, as in advertising, you can't please all the people all the time, and if you try, the result may be that nobody is satisfied.

That's right, we're kind of a big deal.

A while ago, Hotcards received a very nice email from Richard Darrell, the founder of BitRebels.com. BitRebels is a site that brings together all the coolest stuff on the internet into one place, and in Richard's explorations as curator of web awesome, he came across Hotcards.

Richard was kind enough to call Hotcards.com a "strong and interesting website" and he asked if we'd like to do an interview that would take a behind-the-scenes look at what makes us so super-cool. The results of that interview are now available for your viewing pleasure.

Of course, along with all this interview-y goodness, during the process we also got involved in BitRebels' Epic Giveaway. We were just one of many companies who contributed free products and services to the giveaway (the list was nothing short of epic, as advertised), but somehow those fine folks at BitRebels managed to give it all away.

We'll be following up with more details on the Hotcards winners, so stay tuned!

Just when you thought it couldn’t get more po-mo.

One of the most famous pieces of typography on the planet earth is the Hollywood sign. The giant block letters in the hills above Hollywood are iconic, but apparently, that doesn’t make them indispensible.

Turns out the owners of some of the land around the sign, Fox River Financial Resources, have been trying to sell the land for two years. Luckily, the whopping $22 million price tag has kept the property on the market, and out of the speculative gazes of developers.

Now, Trust for Public Lands, a conservation group in California, has struck a deal with Fox River to buy the land for $12 million, turning it into a nature preserve safe from condo builders. Apparently this whole recession? Bad for developers, good for non-profits (at least when it comes to buying at sympathetic rates).

Still, $12 million is no small potatoes. In an effort to raise money for the purchase, Trust for Public Lands will apparently be covering the Hollywood sign up tomorrow with a giant banner that reads, "Save the Peak." Cahuenga Peak is the name of the hill adjoining the sign, which the TPL is endeavoring to protect.

Sorry, Colts fans! Try to understand!

Every year, all across the country, printers watch the Super Bowl with bated breath. Because we love football, but also because the results of these championship games have a huge impact on who's printing what Monday morning.

Competition for printing Super Bowl t-shirts, banners, posters, and other paraphernalia is fierce, but the work is anything but guaranteed. Normally, different printers are contacted to produce victory collateral for the champions, depending on who wins. Because shipping of the collateral is so time-sensitive, printers are normally slatted for every region, and the ones printing - in this case, since New Orleans won – Saints gear, are not necessarily the same print providers who would be working their butts off right now if the Colts had won.

Pros and cons.

As a printer, it's possible to come at sustainable printing strategies from many angles. Using green materials, employing ecologically mindful design sensibilities, recycling, cutting down on waste, and even encouraging employees to lead greener lifestyles are all parts of the puzzle.

But the point when printers really step their game up comes when they begin to consider infrastructure. Using alternative energy sources, like wind or solar power, is one consideration. Building a facility, from the ground up, designed around environmentally sound architectural philosophies, is another.

A calculated risk.

Over the last few years, a trend has been growing among large online businesses – particularly retailers. Turns out catalog printing is a marketing strategy that works, not "even for online business" but "particularly for online business."

The big success story in 2009 was the Zappos.com print catalog. Zappos has been experimenting with print advertising for a few years, but its only in 2009 that they really committed and mailed out three complete catalogs over the course of the year, at a rate of almost 1 million copies per issue.

According to Zappos brand marketing department, the catalog proved to be a great way to get in touch with "lapsed customers." People who hadn't bought anything online for a while responded positively to the catalog mailer, often returning to make larger purchases than they had in the past.

In fact, King Fish Media, the company publishing the catalog for Zappos, says that the average catalog order is twice the size of those normally made through direct online sales.

This phenomenon can probably be attributed to the fact that the average online shopper doesn't mind making small purchases, whereas unpracticed buyers might feel like the purchase is a big event, and are therefore prepared to invest more. However, this begs the question: will shoppers reeled in by catalog mailers return for a second round?