Screen Printing - August/September 2016 - 31

a huge renaissance in P-O-P printing. Screen equipment developers responded with the introduction of wide-format inline multicolor presses that sold for a million dollars or more, depending on size. Inkjet stunned the designer community with its brilliant color, but it was so slow you could not scale the output for larger orders. It caused graphics screen printers to really buckle down and learn color management, CMYK halftone printing, and process control. Wide-format inkjet printers also further crippled the market for photographic services since screen printers could use them to cheaply make very large film positives. It made large CMYK separations affordable for much smaller runs. Today, the digital printing revolution has decimated some of the traditional printing markets. Virtually every segment has felt the effect as run lengths continue to move toward a unit of one. The huge capital investments and associated run lengths required to make them economical have collapsed. Big litho printers have all made investments in wide-format inkjet and continue to cross the specialty graphics line. The Changing Landscape of Digital Marketing Now, 30-some years later, we find ourselves in the middle of the fourth digital disruption, this time in marketing. Access to data and new ways of leveraging it are changing the marketing industry in the same way that desktop publishing, digital film output, and digital printing once changed our businesses. Every phase of sales and marketing has been profoundly affected. It's a historic change that comes down to one very simple concept: Nothing happens until something gets sold. Digital marketing allows us to directly measure everything we do - every click, every page viewed, every action taken. For the first time, it's possible to track the cost of our marketing actions directly to the point of sale. It can all be monetized. This has the potential to cause even greater disruption in our industry than any previous digital innovation. In fact, it is already happening. You need to understand that digital marketing isn't about social media, email campaigns, landing pages, and websites. It's not about video, auto-responders, or any of those things. It's about data - data that is collected, analyzed, and interpreted. You've probably heard the term "Big Data" but may not realize that you're very much a part of the concept. Everything you do on the web, smartphone, and cable is being collected, filtered, and analyzed. Sometimes it's personally identifiable; many times it's anonymous yet aggregated. The data is being used in previously unheard-of ways. Non-relational events are being identified and the resulting behaviors revealed. Eventually, this process provides the companies that want to sell us things with incredibly powerful information. This may sound a bit creepy, and in many ways it is. But it's important to know that all of these data analytics are available to us too, right now, for super cheap. This is why everyone is jumping on Facebook, in particular, but also on Twitter, LinkedIn, and more. Every user can access the data behind each platform and use it for their own marketing efforts. It takes some work, and the learning curve is steep at first, but anyone can do it. The bigger concern in our industry is the parties whom all this data is attracting. The previously unfamiliar world of quants and data scientists is landing directly in our backyard. Some really big fish are circling our little pond. What the Escalation of Venture Capital Means Venture capital (VC) is a type of financing earmarked for early-stage technology developers judged to have high growth potential. The people with VC money to invest have discovered the decorated apparel industry in a big inline multicolor screen press 3M ScotchPrint early 1990s Adobe Photoshop 1990 1991 Images courtesy of: Adobe (Illustrator); Murat Baysan/Shutterstock.com (drum scanner); Thieme (inline press); Canon (Océ Arizona) august/september 2016 31

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Screen Printing - August/September 2016