Commentary & Analysis
We are about to be hit by a “Third Wave” of technology disruption that will negatively impact the demand for print. Or will it? Not all print is created equal these days. Here are some suggestions for how to weather the storm.
By Richard Romano
Published: May 1, 2017
If you have been tuning in to WhatTheyThink’s monthly economics webinars, hosted by Dr. Joe Webb and myself, you have heard us road test material for our forthcoming book The Third Wave, which is slated to be published at Print 17 in September. Essentially, the theme of the book is that there is a “third wave” of technology coming that threatens to further disrupt the market demand for print.
So if the Third Wave is soon to be upon us, what were the first two?
If you recall, the First Wave crested in 1998, which was the point at which the consumer Internet took hold. Print’s role had become in large part the way to drive traffic to everyone’s brand-new websites, but pretty soon Google emerged and better search capabilities put an end to that. We had remarked at the time that 1998–1999 would be seen as the end of the “good old days” of mainstream US commercial printing, and it was.
The Second Wave came a decade later in 2008, with the joint explosion of both social media (Facebook and Twitter both launched in 2006) as well as the Apple iPhone and, more importantly, the AppStore. At the same time, broadband penetration exceeded 50 percent of homes and WiFi was turning up virtually everywhere. The naughts were a tough decade for print, but much of the carnage had slowed down by the latter half of the decade, when social media would again change the market demand for print. (The Great Recession didn’t help, and only exacerbated the move away from print in favor of faster and cheaper digital media.)
So now we have an impending Third Wave, sighted out at sea and due to crash on the shore in 2018. (OK, we admit the “8” motif is a bit of a construct on our part, but the waves have fallen roughly a decade apart in these periods.) In the Third Wave, mobile gets “smart,” and the “Internet of Every Last Little Thing,” as we are calling The Internet of Things, creates the demand for ever more immediate information. For example, we are reaching the point where even typing search terms into Google has become too slow and laborious; now we just yell out a question and Alexa or Siri provides us an immediate answer. The jury is still out on whether the Internet of Things will be the Greatest. Thing. Ever. or a dystopian Black Mirror-esque nightmare, but it’s coming.
The Third Wave will have major repercussions on the printing industry, and especially mainstream commercial print, and the book will go into detail about how print businesses should prepare. The reason I am bringing this up here is because wide-format and specialty printing are well-poised to serve as a “shelter from the storm,” sort of the leeward side of the industry
It’s not just general communication technology that is changing—smartphones, apps, the IoT, etc.—but the technology in our own industry is changing, as well. There was a time when a shop could buy an offset press and it would last for decades. And while that is still true, there are compelling reasons to not want a press that lasts for decades.
Here’s an example. My 82-year-old aunt, until the day she died a year ago, continued to have one of those old, rotary-dial Bakelite phones that she had literally been using since the 1960s. And it still worked! Sure, you could say, they knew how to make ’em back then, wasn’t it great that a phone could last literally for decades. But while that old Bakelite phone still could make and receive calls, and the sound quality was far superior to cellphones, it was completely inadequate to the communications environment of the 2010s. First of all, having a rotary dial, it was unable to navigate modern phone systems (they did away with the option for rotary dial users ages ago). You couldn’t even dial # on it! It also had no way to add voicemail (or even an answering machine), and needless to say texting was out of the question, let alone apps. Now, you could argue—as my aunt often did—“what do I want with those things?” and as individuals we can certainly choose to live offline or as Luddites, but as businesspeople, we don’t have that luxury. We have to adopt the technologies that our customers are using, and adopt new technologies to offer products and services that the market demands.
There are compelling business reasons to invest in small-format digital printing capabilities (which we cover in the book but is beyond the scope of this article), but this is where wide-format and specialty graphics come in. Today’s digital equipment makes it easier than ever to offer virtually unlimited personalized and printed products, for very little cost. For example, for under about 30 grand you can get a UV benchtop printer that allows you to print on all kinds of 3D objects, from pens to smartphone cases, to YETI cups. Dye-sublimation machines are coming down in price, which enable the short-run printing of soft signage, garments, and other textile products. Signage and display graphics are in hot demand today, and the equipment on the market makes it easier than ever to get into those areas. Will those areas be in hot demand forever? Of course not. But digital technologies are better able to be upgraded—or completely replaced—in rapid response to how the market for what they produce is changing.
The Third Wave, like the previous two, is all about making information more immediately available (“Alexa, who was the 17th President?”), as well as making it more relevant and actionable to the recipient. Print can’t often compete with the immediacy aspect of information access, but it can help with relevance and actionability, particularly when it comes to the growing “nichification” of print. Today’s hot niches include signage, display graphics, customized specialty items (golf balls, smartphone cases etc.), customized apparel (short-run T-shirts, hats, hoodies, etc.), décor, and so on.
The Third Wave will further transform people’s relationship with print—if they even choose to have one at all—and the industry needs to be ready. There are many ways to batten down the hatches, but exploiting new technologies is one way to avoid being dashed on the rocks.
