This Week …
with Frank Romano

This is Frank Romano for WhatTheyThink.com. I’m here in New York City at a company called LDI. It looks like LD1 on their shirts, by the way, but it is LDI. And they’re a dealer for digital printing equipment of all kinds, from wide format to MFP’s and everything in between. They handle Sharp and Oce and especially Canon. And today I’m here to give a little talk for a meeting that they’re having on digital printing. It’s only for the afternoon, it should be fun, but the great thing about this place, in addition to the equipment, is the view. You’re looking at Times Square behind me, by the way. In fact, I could move out of the way because it’s a great shot. And I understand that they allow families to come up here at Thanksgiving time because the parade goes right by outside here.

But this is a good opportunity to talk to you about what’s happening in the industry. And that is that a lot of organizations are having their meetings now in their offices. It used to be that we’d go to big trade shows. But I’m seeing more and more of these events at dealer offices, company offices or other venues in cities that are near railroad stations or easy to get to. This is a major change in the way companies have marketed in the past. They used to bring equipment to these big events and now what you’re seeing is many more smaller events. Like, Rochester that brings a ton of people in for the companies that are based there. This New York City dealer is bringing people here probably from the entire metropolitan area. And what they have around me, just about every machine you could possibly imagine from various companies. So you have a choice. And what I like about graphics arts dealers or dealers in digital printing is they give you choice. You’re not tied into one particular vendor. You have the opportunity to look at equipment from a number of different vendors and see what works best for you.

And in fact, when I go visit users, what I discover is no one had a preference for only one company, they usually have equipment from a multiplicity of companies because they bought it **** to solve individual problems. And if they get it from one dealer who can service and take care of it that makes a lot of sense.

So in any case, like Karen, you’ve done a wonderful job as my videographer you can now, you can follow me around for life and record everything I do and we’ll put it on Facebook and it will be real time. So, thank you very much.

And that is my opinion.