Anyone with a digital press could in theory be doing variable data printing, bringing the benefits of personalised direct mail to their customers. So why are more digital printers not getting stuck in? Michael Walker looks at the factors that govern VDP success.

Recent events suggest that print is starting to enjoy something of a renaissance as a marketing medium, from Ikea’s ‘bookbook’ campaign and Airbnb’s new customer magazine, to stories of online fashion retailers revitalising their email opt-ins by sending out personalised mailers.

‘It’s known that email opening rates are declining,’ said Canon’s European Solutions business development manager Antony White, and though he admits that less print is being sent out because of the switch to online, ‘what we get is higher quality, with more cut-through. It’s valuable, current and effective.’

Print is not new and neither is the idea of variable data printing (VDP), which has been around for 30 years. What is more recent is the idea of transpromo and personalised, customised or ‘versioned’ direct mail purely for marketing purposes, and, intimately linked to that, multi-channel or cross media campaigns.

Since digital presses are the ideal tools for printing documents of this kind efficiently, and many of the digital front-ends (DFEs) that drive them come with VDP-capable software included as standard, you might expect there to be a lot of highly creative VDP material being printed.

While there are examples of firms producing everything from point of sale materials to labels and packaging using VDP, research commissioned by Canon and published in its 2014 report ‘Building Your Future With Print’ found that although 48% of print buyers questioned are already commissioning targeted direct mail and a further 22% are thinking of doing so, the number of printers who see themselves as communication service providers has actually decreased between 2008 and 2014, from 54 to 46%; although 80% are acutely aware of a need to change their businesses, only four per cent suggested starting or improving a cross media or multi-channel service offering as a route forward.

The research also suggests that print buyers want help in understanding the possibilities of digital print, but do not necessarily feel that they are getting it from their print providers. Kevin O’Donnell, marketing manager, Graphic Communications Operations Europe at Xerox, thinks it is not entirely the printers’ fault:

‘Manufacturers have to shoulder some of the ‘could do better’ report; printers don’t know what they don’t know. They need to have a marketing conversation with their clients, otherwise they’ll only go on getting static print work. And if they’re not talking to them, someone else will,’ he said, adding that this is why Xerox has launched a business development programme for its customers.

Apart from the anonymity of the phrase ‘variable data printing’, perhaps some of the difficulty in tackling it comes from a lack of ready understanding of who does what.

‘Typically the graphic designer at an agency designs the piece, the client signs it off and the design plus the rules and database are handed off to the printer, but that’s by no means universal, every combination is out there,’ said Martin Bailey, chief technology officer with RIP developer Global Graphics. Simon Ellington of ROI360 points to a client that he describes as an ‘agency-cum-direct mail management specialist’, while Johannes Goebel of DirectSmile, now part of EFI, says that 90% of his old company’s eponymous cross media authoring software users are printers. Mark Stephenson, product manager, Digital Solutions, at Fujifilm, who mainly works with XMPie users, also reports that it is mostly printers who are taking the database, creating the template and ‘making it all work’.

 

Don’t fear the data

Possibly the biggest challenge for printers new to VDP is getting to grips with the database which contains all the variable content, text and graphics, plus the information that is used by the business rules to decide what content is assembled for which recipient. There is a spectrum of options for addressing this, however, from working with simple Excel spreadsheets or CSV files to hiring your own data specialist, or working with a supplier like ROI360 which offers a managed data sourcing and maintenance service to ‘take the pain out of offering something new’, as ROI’s Simon Ellington puts it.

‘Having the right mindset is really important,’ said Martin Bailey. ‘Printers who are successful with VDP see the data as the key – the printer is just an output device.’ Xerox’s Kevin O’Donnell agrees, pointing out that ‘even simple name and address personalisation requires thinking slightly differently about the job’.

A potential complication with the data aspect is that it might not all arrive neatly packaged in one database. Some components, typically product or lifestyle images, might reside on a digital asset management (DAM) server; customer information could be drawn from a CRM system. VDP is also a natural partner for web to print, so some of the data might be entered online or uploaded by the end client. It might even come from social media sites – Gershon Alon, manager, Workflow Solutions, HP Indigo cites, the example of creating a calendar from friends’ images on Facebook via XMPie.

Designing the print job for VDP is also a necessary skill. Pat McGrew, inkjet evangelist at HP in the US, commented: ‘Someone has to analyse the data, the designer has to be informed about what’s going to change, and it has to be programmed and tested.’ She also warned about complying with data privacy laws, which can vary by country even within the EU.

Martin Bailey also pointed out that how a VDP job is constructed is critical to performance at output time, which is why Global Graphics earlier this year published ‘Do PDF/VT right’, a guide to constructing jobs efficiently for output.

 

Output routes

Some VDP authoring software is tied to the press or digital front end vendor, as with Xerox’s FreeFlow and EFI’s FreeForm; third-party cross-media/multi-channel software from developers such as GMC, Objectif Lune and PTI will provide output in a variety of VDP formats, both vendor-specific such as IBM AFP, Creo VPS or Xerox VIPP, and open formats such as PPML, PDF and PDF/VT.

These formats govern the degree of graphical flexibility that is possible in a VDP job, and have implications for previewing, pre-flighting and colour management. Printers who are new to VDP will be most familiar with PDF and it is possible to print VDP jobs from PDF files where each data record is a separate page.

PDF/VT, which was specifically designed to optimise processing of files of this type, has still to gain significant traction, despite being widely supported by DFE vendors. High volume transactional printers using older technologies like AFP or VIPP are understandably reluctant to change their proven workflows. Kevin O’Donnell commented that many customers are still using Xerox’s proprietary VIPP ‘because it works’; John Davies at Fujifilm says PPML appears to be the format of choice, while Peter Bergman, Screen’s European Workflow project manager, confirms that although the Equios workflow only accepts PDF, there are various third-party conversion tools to support the other formats.

The continued prevalence of older VDP formats may be one of the reasons why RIP performance is not seen as a significant bottleneck. HP’s Gershon Alon dismisses it as a ’90s issue’ and John Davies says that the Fujifilm XMF RIP can handle offset-quality pages for the new JetPress 720S; Peter Bergman at Screen says that when driving the recently-announced TruePress Jet520HD, which can print at up to 75 metres per minute, a memory-to-memory transfer is used to avoid the delays in writing to disk. All three vendors do use scalable RIP architectures, however, HP with Global Graphics’ Harlequin and the other two using Adobe PDF Print Engine. HP recently ran a project for Coke in which more than two million unique bottle labels, generated from random combinations of vector art elements, were processed faster than the Indigo printer could print them.

The DFE is not just about RIP processing speed, however. EFI’s product line manager Hans Sep demonstrated in a recent webinar a number of ease-of-use and productivity features of the Fiery controller, such as linking to external data for pre-flighting or re-printing a single record. Other production management features are either on offer or in development by other vendors.

Pre-flighting is essential in VDP, especially as most of the older formats mean that the finished pages only come together at print time and cannot be previewed. Imposition for VDP also needs careful attention, especially in the case of the B2 format inkjet presses from Fujifilm and Screen.

 

Open road

Asked what barriers she sees to uptake of VDP, Pat McGrew replied: ‘No barriers other than education. The challenge is that the customers who are least educated in terms of creating VDP files are those who are the least able to invest the time and effort.’ Between printers who can see the opportunity, and the vendors who are keen to support them, it should be possible to set out on the road to cross media and higher value, more consultative sales:

‘I see VDP as the perfect entry point for offering cross media services,’ said EFI’s Johannes Goebel. ‘A printer who has done VDP even on a basic level knows more about data handling than most of the agencies and so he will be able to position himself as an expert in this field.’

Or as Pat McGrew puts it more succinctly: ‘Think, crawl, walk, run.’