The ‘Print Buyer Drupa’ —Sherburne

Since there is so little value-add on the part of the printer, you can be assured that, behind the scenes, there have been tough price negotiations, because the marketer will consider—rightly so—that the output is simple commodity printing, and that anyone should be able to handle this job.

This example barely scratches the surface of what is coming at us as an industry. I was told more than once by these innovative, fresh companies in the print buyer section of the Drupa innovation parc that they were inspired to develop their print buyer-oriented solutions because printers were too slow in adopting Web-to-print and multi-channel communications. While we do expect Web-to-print adoption rates to climb steeply over the next couple of years, applications like BISON are much more than Web-to-print, and their sizzle and ease of use may make “Web-to-print” a category quickly obsolete in the minds of marketers.