You think printing stuff is easy. It’s not.
(I found this little rant kicking around in my files, and decided to share it with you, though I’ve given it a fresh edit. I first wrote it about 4 years ago, but it’s as true today as it was then.)
Print production is one of those marketing-related activities which most people think should be really easy, but which is, in fact, the most difficult part of any marketing person’s job. I know you probably find this hard to believe – after all, we’re surrounded by printed materials every single day of our lives: business cards, posters, shopping bags, the direct mail that keeps coming through our mailboxes…you’d think that printing stuff must be easy, right?
But it’s sort of like car repairs: Almost everyone has a car, you see thousands on the road every day, and your auto mechanic doesn’t seem like a quiet genius type – and yet somehow, every time you take your car in because it’s making a tiny little rattle, it always ends up costing you $1500 and 3 days in the shop.
Print media has long been the ugly cousin of what some people would call ‘real’ advertising, with the creatives who do tv, radio and Digital Evangelizing dismissing print specialists as ‘hacks’. But I can assure you that no radio or tv commercial I was ever involved in (including that time we filmed turtles, rabbits, chimpanzees, white mice – one of which died on set – and a couple of cockatiels, all in the same day) has ever caused me anywhere near the kind of grief occasioned by, say, trying to get a custom cardboard box printed.
And this rant was triggered by…
A couple of years ago I was organizing a big event for a client, where the takeaway item was to be a customized cardboard box, sort of like this box they use for Timbits. It was to be printed with the client’s logo and a catchy tagline, and then be filled with various promotional items from the client and their strategic partners.
I tried to plan:
7 weeks pre-event: I asked the printer for an estimate, providing them with the Timbits box for reference
6 weeks pre-event: I reminded the printer I was still waiting for the estimate
5 weeks pre-event: I approved the estimate, which had finally arrived, and asked for dielines to give to the designer
4 weeks pre-event: I lost my shizzle at the printer, who still hadn’t provided dielines
3 weeks pre-event: The printer advised that maybe I should just make my own dielines, since he didn’t know where to get any
2 week pre-event: I lost my shizzle with the designer, who didn’t know any more about the dielines than the printer did, even though I suggested she just copy the Timbits box
1 week pre-event: The design arrived, full of mistakes; the printer, faced with the design, said he couldn’t actually print it as he said he could, which meant an incremental $2500 (for 500 boxes!)
6 days pre-event: The designer had fixed the design, but had sent the wrong version to the printer. Of course, this all happened at 5pm on a Friday, which left me losing my marbles while the designer and printer took off for a stress-free weekend of bliss, and I spent the weekend wondering how quickly I could find a new job, given that the imminent non-production of the boxes was probably going to get me fired for incompetence. And, to add insult to injury, the implication that I probably hadn’t had my ducks in a row from the get-go.
The boxes arrived, in the end – about 2 hours before the event started.
I wish I could tell you that this was an isolated incident. It’s not. I’ve had misprinted, mission-critical items turn up on Christmas Eve; discovered spelling mistakes in $50,000 print jobs that are in a truck on their way to the client; waited 12 weeks for business cards because no one could agree on the card stock; packaging materials that got printed with ‘lorem ipsum’ copy because someone used the wrong version; and had printers tell me that it’s my fault that the client’s official red colour has somehow become pink when printed on banners.
What’s the real problem?
Print production has changed a lot in the past 10-15 years – digital print options have made it much easier (and cheaper) to print in small quantities and you no longer have to wrestle with 2-colour, 4-colour, or 6-colour printing the way you used to.
One problem is that the person in my position – the project manager, as it were – is the only one who ever has to face the client and tell them that there’s going to be a delay or a cost increase or a complete failure. The other people in the process – the printer, the print broker, the designer, the traffic manager, to name a few – don’t have to have that difficult conversation, so it’s easier for them to assume that someone else will double-check their work, and absolve themselves of responsibility for a perfect final product.
However, I think the bigger problem is that print production really does seem like it should be so easy that it’s just not taught or addressed adequately. I know when I first started in marketing, there were plenty of people who were happy to give me instruction in client management, strategy, media planning and writing creative briefs – but no one ever outlined the basics of print production. Maybe they didn’t know; maybe print production is something you can only learn through traumatic experience. Maybe I just started learning before there was a website for every subject imaginable.
I did get one very valuable piece of advice: When you’re talking about print production, it’s “Fast, cheap, good – pick two.”
[end rant here]