Tilting the Playing Field

Compelling cartons

While most digital presses are used for label printing, folding cartons are hardly being left out.  McBattas Packaging and Printing (see “Never say No,” February packagePRINTING), and other players are also seizing the opportunity. And showing just how much digital tilts the playing field, one company doesn’t actually think of printing as one of the services it offers.

That would be OTC Group (www.otcgc.com), a Canadian firm that describes itself as a high performance marketing and promotions company that uses packaging as a communications vehicle. OTC merges a group of software developers, database professionals and analytics experts with a team of designers and packaging production specialists. The company claims to be the first in North America to connect digital printing and packaging with advanced database segmentation analytics and development for increasing and tracking the ROI of marketing programs. “Brand owners,” says company president and COO Tim Graham, “are looking for ways to engage customers with emotion or a personal connection and variable print on cartons is one way to do that.

OTC uses a Xerox iGen 4 and an iGen 150 to print folding cartons that bear personalized messages, unique bar codes, serial numbers, and more as elements in marketing campaigns. Due to sheet width and length limitations (14.3˝ x 26˝) carton sizes can be limited, but a multiple-up run of 3.5˝ X 5.25˝ cartons might total 800,000 cartons.

“The iGens aren’t here to solve a short-run printing issue, but to let us use variable content in a way that enhances ROI,” says Graham. “The iGen produces the vehicle—the value is the data.” And to handle that an important element is the RIP.

The Xerox iGen evolved in a corner of the commercial printing world where constantly changing data was critical for direct marketing and transactional printing. That means the RIP behind the iGens at OTC can easily handle the heavy load of variable images, serial numbers, copy and other content used on OTC’s cartons. Being able to work with the data is the job of the company’s data experts, and then the iGens just print the jobs. Finishing, which can include coating, scoring, and trimming is all done offline.

Yet the big Xerox machines still address an issue familiar to any print provider—controlling waste. “In a traditional world you might need to run a thousand cartons to get the color right. You’d throw those away, then print the job, which would go to a co-packer for serialization using inkjet. With the iGen we run a few sheets to check color, then run the entire job, serialization and all.”

Mixing it up

Both the data handling and short-run abilities are in play at Mid-York Press in Sherburne, NY (www.midyorkpress.com) where a Xerox iGen 150 handles short-run and customized folding cartons that can’t be produced on the company’s offset presses. Digital packaging specialist Tom Revoir says the machine comfortably runs from 80-lb gloss text up to 18-point SBS with run lengths ranging up to 5,000 sheets. Beyond that volume and it’s usually more cost effective to use one of Mid-York’s offset presses.

Yet, having both technologies under one roof offers ‘big picture’ advantages for Mid-York. “Larger companies that normally ask for long runs on the offset presses are also using the iGen for short runs of new products and for test marketing. At the same time, we’re able to help out smaller companies that are starting up and those that don’t need large runs now, but who may turn to us for longer runs as their needs change.”

Mid-York is also seeing more and more variable data jobs, and Revoir thinks others are on the way as consumer products companies leverage the ability to customize and target messaging. In that respect he thinks digital printing is a marketing manager’s dream. “It’s the wave of the future.”

ColorZone’s Josh Feller agrees: “Banking on technology was the right thing to do. And it put me ahead of the competition!”