Margie Dana

Why I Prefer Baking Chocolate Chip Cookies

Though they’re my husband’s favorite cookies bar none, chocolate chips are my go-to cookies to bake for one reason: I don’t have to grease the pans.

Know that I’m a baker. Whether we’re talking cookies, pies, breads, scones, brownies, muffins or the occasional cake (a small family can’t eat through a whole one), I LOVE to bake.

But chocolate chips are my fallback cookies to bake because they save me a few steps. They’re efficient and quick. And I’m a busy person. Frankly, I don’t even like them all that much.

Which brings me to your printing company. If you use a process or a technology that shaves time off of customers’ jobs, well, toot this horn early and often.

Is it a proofing procedure or review process? Is it a production capability or a finishing technique? Do you do things inline that speed up a job’s time-to-market?

Tell your customers. Tell your prospects. Your step-saver may be the sweet solution they’re looking for.

This Is the Content a Panel Moderator Needs

There are debates in the air – can you feel it? Talk about slings and arrows…

All this talk about who’s moderating the presidential debates got me thinking about panel moderators.

I often moderate panels. Here’s the content I must have at my disposal when I do:

Names, titles, and bios of each panelist. If someone has a tricky name to pronounce, I have the phonetic spelling of that name as well, just to make sure I don’t botch it.
Short introduction. It never hurts to have your introductory remarks printed off and handy, plus the name/s of the event sponsors if applicable.
List of questions I’ll be posing. And then some. It’s standard to share the questions ahead of time with your panelists so everyone’s prepared. Always have extra questions handy as well. Sometimes you go through the prepared questions quickly and find yourself at a loss for words. Avoid this! Draft a lot of extra questions.
Copies of relevant articles if available. Often, the topic we’re covering is timely and/or controversial, and other journalists or experts have weighed in. I like to print copies of such content and have them with me. I highlight key passages on them so I can reference them quickly.
Attendee list. If you’re lucky, you’ll have received a list of audience members. When I get such a list, I print it and have it in front of me. Rule #1 of public speaking: know thy audience.

Having this information handy will ease your job as moderator and enhance your professionalism.

Print, the Tie that Binds

One of the nicest things about being me is getting to meet incredible people.

Like Greg Mroczek, a savvy and super-smart book manufacturing expert who works in publishing at Hahhhvaaaad.

We go way back. About 13 years ago I started a print buyers group in Boston and ran dinner meetings throughout the year. Greg started attending those dinners from the beginning, and he came to the annual conferences I produced, too. We’ve kept in touch ever since. Now and then he weighs in on one of my blog posts, and he tends to email me when he comes across some cool print- or publishing-related article. I consider him a leading resource in book manufacturing. He’s absolutely the real deal and, like so many of us, a fool for print.

Over burgers and fries recently (let me be clear: the fries were his), we talked about printing people we knew back in the ‘80s. There were a lot of them, many quite colorful characters, and we swapped too many stories to share here. The 90 minutes flew by.

Greg scolded me for being such a Kindle fan (he works on physical books only) and we discussed our love-hate relationship with digital newspapers. He got the last word in when he stated unequivocally that ebooks are declining in popularity and sales, so long live real books. I certainly have no problem with that, but I do love my Kindle.

Greg Mroczek, the real deal.

It would be great to see Greg more often, not only because he’s smart and funny and tells great stories, but also because – maybe primarily because – we share this thing about print.

If you’ve read my stuff for a while, you know what I’m talking about. Being with kindred spirits who “get” print and who know what it’s like working with (and in Greg’s case, once upon a time, for) printers is a real gas.

The reason we met was because he wanted to give me a broadsheet from the NYT that came out in August. It’s an excerpt from a long piece of fiction by Colson Whitehead called The Underground Railroad that was available only in print.

Even this ebook fan had to admit: it’s a lasting thing of beauty.

3 Reasons to Talk with Your Blogger

Whether your company’s blogger is an insider or a freelancer, you two need to talk.

As much as can be communicated about a new post by email, nothing works as well as a live conversation for us bloggers.

Here are my top 3 reasons why you two should talk:

Your voice matters. When I speak with you about why a post is so important to you and your market, I can literally hear the passion and understand your viewpoint. Often, a client says something – a word, a phrase – that nails it.
We can zero in on the one point your blog post should make. Make no mistake, there should be only one key point. If I don’t know exactly where I should be going with a post about, say, direct mail, who knows if I’ll nail it?
It saves time. A 10-minute conversation with you about a post helps me organize my thoughts and ask targeted questions as we speak. Huge time saver, so you’ll probably get your post delivered sooner.

A good blogger will prepare herself with questions ahead of that conversation with a client and take notes during it.

Don’t risk publishing a blog that misses the boat. Have a quick chat with your blogger every time.

Where Will the Enthusiasm for Print Come from Tomorrow?

Professional print buyers working in businesses and agencies are the print industry’s most powerful influencers, bar none.

These print production specialists, particularly those who are baby boomers, are responsible for keeping print part of the discussion within their organizations.

But they do much more than just keep print in those conversations when marketing considers channels for a campaign, because experienced print buyers tend to have a history in print manufacturing. Many were once employed in commercial printing as sales or service reps. Many are trained as graphic designers. They identify with print.

As someone who’s studied print buyers for over two decades, I know all of this to be true.

Experienced print customers in industries and in agencies are their organizations’ de facto print experts. Their managers and team members, their bean counters and their purchasing agents, all look to them for recommendations. Who should print this job? What’s a fair price? When do we need to find additional print manufacturing expertise? What paper or other substrate will work best? And at the heart of it, why should we print this at all?

Whether you’re a printer reading this post or a print buyer, you recognize these print customers. You serve them or work alongside them or identify as one yourself.

I know many of these “print insiders” personally. And to a person, one quality they share that needs to be acknowledged is their passion for print. They strive daily to share this enthusiasm with their colleagues and to enlighten them about advances in printing technologies.

Imagine how difficult this is today, in our world of Facebook, Twitter, mobile apps, and Pokémon Go.

These experienced print insiders bring an acute appreciation of all-things-print to their roles. They are the keepers of the print flame inside of their organizations. They wield enormous clout in the decision-making process where print is concerned. And if they happen to work in marketing environments, this clout is even more significant.

Here’s what I’m talking about. When a marketing team plans a new campaign and the issue of which channels to use (and why) comes up, print buyers working with them are – best case scenario – more likely to offer ideas, reasons, examples and arguments for print. (If this marketing team includes a print provider in this discussion, so much the better. But in a study I did with John Zarwan, only 16% of brand owners invite printers to the marketing table.)

John Zarwan and I conducted a webinar recently for PRIMIR, on a white paper we developed for them about brand owners and the print purchasing process. While I was speaking, I had a few “a-ha moments,” like this one:

If highly experienced print buying professionals are the primary champions of print for and within their organizations, what happens when they’ve exited the workforce?

Do you think the new wave of entry-level marketers and media staffers will take up the torch of print? How well do colleges and universities cover print as a medium in marketing and media curricula, or even in graphic design programs?

When the baby boomer print buyers retire, will those who fill their positions bring the same enthusiasm and print sensibility to their roles?

This changeover in personnel isn’t about to happen this month or even this year. But as old positions are filled with new marketers, the graphic arts industry stands to lose some of its most stalwart supporters: the print insiders.

Getting ahead of this changeover is what I’d recommend to the print industry. Now’s the time to develop strategies for dealing with a generation of marketers and purchasing professionals who lack print manufacturing knowledge.

How can the industry generate enthusiasm for print, once senior-level print customers take their passion out the door with them when they retire?

Monthly Archives: September 2016