Editor’s note: In New York City on June 19, 2014, Joel Quadracci, chairman, president and CEO of Quad/Graphics, Inc., made the keynote presentation at PRIMEX East, a leadership conference sponsored by IDEAlliance, Quad and other industry partners. Interviewed by What They Think contributing editor Patrick Henry, and answering numerous questions from the audience, Quadracci covered a wide range of subjects relating to the state of the industry and Quad’s role in it. Following is an edited transcript of some of his remarks.
At Quad, we call ourselves an integrator of multichannel content — we’re not trying to pretend we’re something else. But when you think about the way the printer is being asked to act, it’s all about content and who is at the heart of your content. It’s your suppliers who are trying to take that content and get it out there for you in some shape or form.
Back in the ’90s, when we all went direct-to-plate, we got your files, helped make the pages, output the film and made the plates to print the pages on. Then we got rid of film and became very digitally-oriented. Dotcom 1.0 came along, and you all started saying, “You know that content you’re using to make plates for us? Can you also start converting that for things we’re doing online? We’ve started up a web page, and we want to get the same assets up there, but in a different format.”
Printers had to become experts at managing big, four-color digital assets, not just for an efficiency of print workflow, but also for transitioning the assets into other formats.Then, of course, dotcom 2.0 continued on.The smartphone arrived, and now we have people asking us, “How do we integrate our content with smartphones?Then there’sthis QR code thing-a-ma-jig. What does this do? ThePost Office gave adiscounttouse the QR code, so how do I do that?” We started saying to customersthatinstead ofjust having userssnap the QRcode and go to a website that is not even formatted for a smartphone, let’sfirst of all help you format it for a smartphone. And beyond that, let’s help you produce a video that willstartplaying todemonstrate theproduct to which the QR code is attached.
So you can see how this thing spider websfrom there. Printers are so embedded in your process and your content.As things happened,we started being asked to do the things that got us talking to marketers about their challenges and then into talking about their brand. After all, it’s about what your brand stands for and how you are going to execute on it.In this day and age,what you think the brand says had better be what the consumer thinks and feels it is.
That’s why we’re spending a lot of time on brand management, on helping people take content and use it so that the consumer feels that you get it and are connected all the way through. Our key is about helping people make sure that your interaction with the consumer is representative of what you want the brand to say to them, and that they feel it that way. That’s going to become really important.
Most transformative technology in printing
From a go-forward standpoint, inkjet printing is one of the most important technologies because as you talk about multichannel, everyone’s talking about data-driven marketing. Every marketer out there wants a return on their dollar spent for marketing. They want to know not just if the group that Joel Quadracci exists in as a demographic responded to our advertising. They want to know if Joel did. They want to know, where did he go? Did he go on his mobile device? Wasthat triggered by print? Once he went on the mobile device, did he go into a store? When he went into the store, what happened? And what did he buy, so that now we can start to issue relevant offers to him?
It’s all about data now. You hear the overused term ‘big data.’ Well, this industry’s been using big data for years, especially on the publishing and catalog side, taking inkjet messages and instead of having a million catalogs going out to everybody with the same thing, you’ve got a million versions going out now, really targeted to that person. Now what you’re seeing is spot four-color inkjet that you can use in combination with the efficiency of the traditional print platform. Now you can layer in four-color inkjet on the fly, where you need it and where it matters, including different pictures.
It’s really about customer experience, and we’ve been doing thisfor thousands of years. For example, when you saw sandalsin a store in ancient Greece and you liked them, you bought them. And the nexttime youwent by the store,the storekeeper remembered you and said, “Hey, by the way, I’ve got something else for you.” What happened is that we lost measurement as we went to mass marketing. It used to be that we’d send the same Sears Roebuck catalog to everybody, with all the products. With database technology, we can talk to a group within that mailing list and talk to an individual within that group.
Making print interactive
Mobile is a big opportunity, because print really does drive a lot of traffic online. But watch the technology change. We saw the Amazon.com smartphone yesterday, and it’s going to have image recognition. It’s going to be able to recognize objects. So if you like that coffee mug and if they sell it at Amazon.com, you can hold your phone, it’ll recognize it and you’ll be able to purchase it.
They’re not there yet, but that’s what they said they’re going to be able to do. They have all your content, and that means we can programme any page, any time. Something you printed 10 years ago, we could make interactive tomorrow, and have your phone just recognize the image and pull down augmented reality or a video.
And all thisstuff is measurable. With interactive print, we can tell you where the person wasstanding in the US when they used the mobile phone to scan page 10 of your magazine.If we have the cell phone number, we can tell you who it was. We can tell you how many times that individual device came back. We can also ultimately download a message to them to get them to the retail store nearest to where they’re standing. It’s all very, very measurable.
What mobile could mean for personalization?
Mobile will come into play very strongly to a point where maybe you don’t have to vary the advertisement, but you have to be able to connect the dots for the advertiser and say, here’s an interactive opportunity. It’s not just about interactive printing; mobile is going to be about interactive everything.
Consumers are going to be very used to doing this. It’s not going to be, “How do I make them know it’s interactive?” They’re actually going to be expecting it in the future, and not that far away, because we’re doing it already. And as it gets built into the technology, you’re not going to have to change the page or personalize it, but you’re going to have to give them some sort of tie-in that makes it powerful for the consumer to want to see that ad on mobile.Ithink that’s probably where you’re going to have the biggest opportunity, and maybe bypassing some of the personalization.
How do you expect to promote print?
I think you’ve got to be more aggressive about it. I still see that the biggest challenge — and I’m not just talking about publishing, it’s anyone who’s marketing — is making sure that you move faster in the changesin your own organization so that you can talk more globally on omni-channel and execute on it.
I’ll meet with ad agencies, and I’m always shocked at how little they know about print in terms of what’s changed with the technology. They’ll spend a lot of time telling me about what they do in terms of marketing, and telling people how to advertise in France for Nokia, with mobile devices, with digital. And I’ll say, “What do you do with print? Did you know that when you layer print with digital, with smartphones, the collective response rates go up quite a bit?” The people who are advising the buyers don’t really know what print can do.
We’ve got to do a better job educating the buyers themselves. They’ve all been riding this exciting wave of technology. But remember what my father said when he was talking about dotcom 1.0. Harry said, “There’s a million homes out there with a VHS blinking 12 noon …12 noon …12 noon … because no one likes to take the time to use the technology to its fullest.”
I think you’ll get to a point of excitement about what smartphones have done, and then the ‘wow’ factor is going to start coming off a little bit. And everybody out there is going to have to look at every way to drive traffic. But you’ve got to be really smart about it. We have some work to do because a lot of people don’t see that. Everyone likes to talk about digital, but without print it’s going to be hard to keep that line going.
How can our business survive?
You’ve got to take control of your destiny when times change quickly, and we’re in a time of things changing very fast. You can’t wait around to figure out what to do, because the doing will be done to you if that happens.
I don’t care what industry you’re in. Running a business these days is really challenging. Everything is being disrupted. As a business, you’ve got to make sure that you move fast and have the wherewithal to do it — to weather storms with a strong balance sheet, but then have the ability to take advantage of those storms.
What are the challenges of integration?
Culture is where most combinations or acquisitions fail. You have to get the troopstowork together.If youlook at our acquisition of Worldcolor, the company had great culture atthe plantlevel,which wasn’t that far off from Quad/Graphics’ overall corporate culture.
Worldcolor’s plant cultures had nuances from the standpoint of what legacy company it originated, but it was very manufacturing-oriented. Worldcolor employees all wanted an overriding culture, and the fact that our corporate culture looked a lot like the culture at the plant level was a huge yield for us. That being said, we’ve spent a tonne of time and effort bringing people together and integrating systems, policies and procedures.
We’ve invested in a lot of education. We have a training programme called ‘Leading Within Quad,’ which is a course we send managers through. We mix new managers with people who have been around for a while, and we give them leadership skills that really help them navigate Quad and learn how to get things done at Quad.It’s very people-oriented, and it has to be.
‘‘Yes, we’re printers’’ (on Quad/Graphics today)
We have a strong culture of people who want to win, who want to learn. We’re a learning company. We want to come up with new ways of doing things that lead to other things.
For instance, Quad/Graphics has a medical business, QuadMed, because way back in 1991, my father said healthcare costs were going too far up, and we have a big concentration of employees, so why don’t we manage healthcare ourselves? We do that for our own company at a significantly lower cost than others in the industry. But now we also have 300,000 patients outside of Quad, for companies outside our industry who want to better manage their employee healthcare costsjustlike Quad.That’s an extreme example, butIthink that yes,we are printers, absolutely, and the stuffthat we’ve migrated into is a result of being a printer, not because we’re trying to get away from print. We believe that the more we can impact how print is used in a multichannel world, we’ll make the overall product that much stronger.
The whole digital space is never going to be bigger for usthan the printside, because of revenue differences. But it’s probably one of the most important things to make the core product very healthy. We’ll continue to migratewhere we migrate. We gotinto some packaging. We got into healthcare only because we became good at something. It’s about having a culture of people who want to win and want to keep going.
Yes, we’re printers. I wear the same blue uniform that the employees on the floor wear. It’s a very production-friendly culture when the CEO is wearing the same thing that you are. And that’s across the organization.
