If the print industry is going to stay competitive, its major players are going to have to stop worrying about beating one other – and start worrying about their rivals in broadcast and the new electronic media.

So says Claude Benoit, project manager with the Quebec Institute of Graphic Communications in Montreal.

Although print still garners 78% of all advertising dollars, he says, that position will soon erode if the industry doesn’t take a cue from broadcast and multimedia, and start using technology to its full advantage.

That’s the thinking behind the Institute’s IPSO Alliance project, which was launched formally last November, and will kick into high gear by early summer.

The goal of the alliance is to bring together key players in the graphic communications industry – advertisers, agencies, publishers, printers and service bureaus – to establish new standards for the digital transmission of print material.

The principal sponsor of this two-year initiative is Bell Emergis, a division of Bell Canada, which has contributed $1.2 million to support the ipso effort. Benoit is now in the process of trying to get various industry players to kick in a matching dollar amount.

The plan calls for some 18-24 companies and organizations, representing all the major sectors of the industry, to take part in the work of the alliance.

Right now, Benoit says, getting material into print is an inefficient and unnecessarily costly process that needs to be streamlined.

Creative work in print has been done digitally since the mid-1980s, he notes. But getting materials to printers and publishers in that form remains problematic.

An ad agency, for example, may send out a file in digital form on a SyQuest disk or a cd, but unless everybody in the industry is working with the same standards, there’s no guarantee that the recipient will be able open the file and read it in its proper form, with the correct colors and fonts.

As a result, the industry still relies on film, which must be shipped to the printer to be rescanned and re-digitized.

Agencies currently spend large sums of money to courier material to film houses, and then to publications across the country. And those costs, inevitably, are passed on to clients.

Eileen Smith, print production manager with Toronto-based Vickers & Benson Advertising, says that her agency sends out masses of material to weekly newspapers across Canada – and even with courier delivery, there can still be delays and missed deadlines.

In some instances, she says, files may be e-mailed between the agency and the film house. But print images generally take too long to transmit (sometimes as much as three hours per file); most often, a cab can get it there faster.

Smith says she would welcome having the ability to send high-resolution material electronically – but for now, that’s just not a reliable option.

‘You can’t just push ‘send’ and hope that it gets there,’ she says. ‘Most often it doesn’t. Some glitch happens and you have to send it all over again.’

Sharon Moniz, production manager with Toronto-based Griffin Bacal Volny, says any new industry standards should cover several options for sending files electronically, including e-mail, Zip disk and cd.

So many things can go wrong when sending digital files that agencies need to know there are backup procedures they can rely upon, she says.

Once the industry has defined its new standards for sending files, Benoit says, there must be assurances that the appropriate telecommunications infrastructure is in place. That’s why Bell Emergis is involved in the ipso project.

Right now, he notes, it takes about one minute per megabyte to send a graphics file over the phone lines – a decidedly sluggish pace. But there may be a way around that.

According to Benoit, the project plan calls for Bell to provide a server to which files can be transferred. That means that an agency would only have to send out a file once. Each of the recipient publications would then be notified that the file was on the server, and could retrieve it at their convenience.

The installation of faster T1 telecommunications lines can also help create efficiencies, by speeding up transmission times. But at present, this option can end up costing an agency or graphics house as much as $8,000-$10,000 a month.

One possibility, Benoit says, is that Bell could introduce a system allowing companies to access T1 lines on a pay-per-use basis.

Also in this report:

– Developing IT plan a valuable exercise: Although it’s tempting to leave decisions about information technology in the hands of others, it makes sense for marketers to be involved in the process p.18

– Geek-free advice on Internet advertising p.22

– Tech tools and toys to make the job easier p.24