Hi.  This is Frank Romano from WhatTheyThink.com.  Well today's episode is a little bit different.  One of the problems I'm having is dealing with printers who think that the things that they have printed in the past will be there forever.  That's not going to happen; the world has changed.  So I'm starting a new series and it's called Go Where The Printing Is.  Go where the printed products are.

If we understand what people will still print into the future, we can understand how to change our marketing and our production, et cetera, to meet it.  If we've been selling certain kinds of products that are going electronic they're going to go away and when they go away your business goes away.

So, for instance, I'm down in Florida for an event and staying at a hotel, of course.  And in the hotel is one of those racks that has all of the promotion pieces for the area.  So one day I went to Epcot.  Now when you go to Epcot -- let me find all my Epcot stuff.  The first thing you have to do is you have to pay to park.  So they give you this to put on your windshield.  There it is.  I was there on the 28th of January.  I had an automobile.  Thank you very much.  I paid $14 and there is a printed piece that, again, gets thrown away but is printed.

When you go in there, they give you a map.  You need a map because that's the only way to find everything.  They call it a Guide Map.  And you will discover that they are in all different languages.  So this one is in French.  This one is in, I think it's Japanese.  This one here is in Portuguese.  There we go.  Then there are special events, so they have special things that indicate those special events.

As you go back to your hotel you discover that there are promotion pieces for other parts of Disney.  There are promotion pieces for airboat rides.  Okay.  I don't like planes; I like boats, I don't know if I could deal with that though.  There are little quick guides that you find in the hotels, the Where Magazine.  I essentially ripped the map out of it; that's all I care about.  Then there's another Disney guide.

Then one night I'm in the hotel room, it's kind of late, and I hear a noise at my door.  What the heck is going on?  I go over to the door and this is under the door.  All right.  I didn't feel like having a pizza at that hour but there was something about this that caught my eye.  Down here at the bottom, the last line that says "Designed and printed by Speedy Quick Printing."  There's a phone number and then a website address.  I don't know if you can see.  I thought that this is a brilliant idea.

First of all, it promotes the printer; maybe I'm there for a convention and I need printing done and there's a -- wow, there's a connection to a printer; I don't have to go to the Yellow Pages or go online and Google it.  And by the way if I want a pizza, hey, I could save that as well.

The event I went down to was an Ose customer communication summit, and of course they printed, as you would expect as a company that makes printers, an agenda as well as a significant amount of other material that was handed out during the event.

So I'm on this kick now, what are the things that we have to print?  Well, menus.  Are you going to have a flat screen at every table and put the menu there?  No, I think there's still a market.  There are some companies out there that actually specialize in menus.  This particular case -- this is an organization that has cafeterias in professional buildings around the New England area and there's a little sticker on here because they print one version of this and then they promote it with these little stickies that they put on it.

I went to an event; it was the New England Direct Marketing Association here in the Boston area and it was at the Microsoft facility in Waltham, Mass.  I picked up everything that was in the little Microsoft lobby, so there were tons of different kinds of flyers on coated paper, uncoated paper, in color, one color sometimes, sometimes multiple colors.  There were cards of all kinds that they probably -- this one was used as a postcard, this one may not have been used, it was just a promotion piece.  Some a little gatefolds.  More flyers.  Tons of flyers, tons and tons and tons of flyers.  Brochures of various kinds.  Little pockets stuffers.  Odd shaped brochures with odd shaped products.  More flyers.  More gatefolds.  More brochures.  You know, the market's out there.

The thing we're not doing is understanding the things that people still need to print and that's what's missing.  So I will be, over the next few months in this little series, go where the print is and try to identify some of those print products that will be there and that people might want to look for as an opportunity for their company.

So that's my opinion.  Take care.

[Next time...]

There's a lot of talk out there, you know, about the iPad, the product from Apple.  And I've determined that I've invented the iPad.  Look.