Recently revised US Postal Service standards provide greater flexibility in the kinds of advertising that can be included with periodicals. Some think the new standards could help boost advertising sales for consumer magazines by opening the door to supplements with no editorial content requirements, among other things. (You can read more about the revised mailing standards, which go into effect Sept. 7, directly from the USPS here.) Below, Joe Schick, director of postal affairs at Quad/Graphics, discusses the mailing standards for periodicals and what he thinks the implications are for printers. CT: Were the revisions made by US Postal Service to the mailing standards for periodicals in any way a surprise? JS: Not really. About six months ago, the Periodicals Advisory Group and the US Postal Service started having some discussions about this and what was discussed is pretty much what ended up in the rule. The US Postal Service has already done some pricing incentives to try to grow volume in First Class and Standard mail but, it really hadn’t done anything for periodicals. This is the USPS’ attempt to try to get periodical mail moving again which, in turn, means more revenue for the US Postal Service, too. CT: What will the impact be for printers? JS: We are expecting more advertising to be generated as a result of this, which should mean more pages, more printing, more inserting and things like that. So it’s a good thing. Where the new standards will have the greatest impact will be with regard to allowing supplements to consist 100% of advertising and in applying the periodicals rate to so-called gimmick pages. CT: Tell us some more about the revised standards for supplements and how they will affect printers? JS: Supplements used to be required to have 25% editorial content and, some times, this was a restriction for folks. Now, however, supplements can be 100% advertising material and, as a result, we expect more pieces to be inserted in a polybag with a publication. At Quad/Graphics, we have a quite a bit of polywrapping equipment on line and have had for some time. So, the new standard hopefully means that equipment will be used more, which is a good thing for us. Some printers who have a lot of publishing clients but are lacking in polywrapping equipment may need to look at adding capacity in this area. CT: What about gimmick pages – how do the revised standards affect printers? JS: Publishers like to do advertising pages with pop-up pieces or embedded computer chips and they’ve always been allowed in publications but, because they didn’t qualify for the periodicals rate, you have seen a lot of them over the last few years. If you go back a number of years, there used to be a lot of these gimmick pages in all kinds of publications. Hopefully, it will get back to those times because even though they were a challenge to produce, it was a good challenge. It meant more business for us because the publishers had more advertising, were doing bigger books and, in some cases, were running the ads on our presses, too. That’s the whole cycle of good that can come out of this.