Hi, this is Frank Romano.

Well, promoting print, that’s the subject today. Here’s a very nice promotion piece, a postcard that was done by the folks down at the printing industries in Southern California. It shows Commerce, California as the mailing point. It’s beautifully printed. It says, “Print is the creative professional’s choice.” And the theme of the whole program is choose print. And I think this is what it’s all about. If we’re going to promote print, you can’t just say print is better.

You have to show what print can do. Well, this is very nice, but this is even nicer. It’s an entire packet of material. And it’s done by a company called Think Patented, which is a printing company in Dayton, Ohio. I visited them, I guess it was last year, but I guess I could be wrong.

It comes in a folder and it’s based on a whole series of materials including a seminar called Print Delivers. This is something they… I forget the date on this thing, it’s coming up… well, by the time you see this video, it’ll be gone. But in any case, it has Eastman Kodak, Leo Burnett advertising Sappi paper and the United States Postal Service as speakers at the event. Not only did they do that, but they did another promotion piece as well. But what comes with the packet is one magazine.

Now not just any magazine. It says, “Futurology, reshaping the communication landscape.” And in it are articles and examples of beautiful print. They’re all in context. They all make sense in terms of promoting printing by showing you what it can do. This is also augmented by another magazine called, the Noodle. I love it. And in here, they’re talking to marketing people specifically. Articles on supply chain marketing, purchasing behavior patterns, things that go on in board rooms, where they argue about how to promote and how to cut a budge and how to manage a business.

And so what they’ve tried to do is give the marketing person, the print buyer, all the materials they need to inform their organization, to show their organization what print can do. And this is what excites the imagination and this is what then will help print to grow. It won’t come from just articles about why print is better than anything else. And by the way, it’s not always better. There are reasons why you use electronic methods and there are reasons why you use print. And there are reasons when you use both of them. And I want to thank Think Patented for putting this kind of material together and there are other printers around the United States doing similar things…

What we should have seen is this kind of stuff coming out of our national associations and that’s where it hasn’t happened. We need really to get together and do this as a team and what’s happening is there’s a lot of little organizations, a lot of organizations around the United States doing this, but no concerted directed, centralized approach. That’s part of the problem, I think. Again, we need to be more of a team in promoting print.

And that’s my opinion.

Well they’re making a movie here today and they’ve got me in costume with makeup…