Grits at the Ritz

Audio geeks of yore used to build their custom stereo systems from expensive German-made components, and the finishing touch was a placard that said something along the lines of:

ACHTUNG!
Das Machinenwerken ist nicht fur Gefingerpoken
und Mittengrabben by das Dumkopfen.
Ist easy Snappenspringen und Blowenfusen
mit Poppencorken und Spitzensparken.
Das Rubbernecken Touristen keepen
das Hands in das Pockets und watch
der Blinkenlights.

People thought this was incontinence-provokingly funny. Not the Hogan's Heroes German, but the fact that it was printed! And not just printed, but printed in a Fraktur-like typeface that looked like a real WWII German poster.
I call it grits-at-the-Ritz humor: An expensive, elaborate delivery system makes you think you're going to get something important and valuable, and then--wham! You get a plate of grits. Or a stupid fake-German sign.
In the vinyl-record era, when people saw anything set in type, they assumed it was important, because typography and printing required machines that cost a small fortune and took years to learn how to use. The folks who made novelty-shop tchotchkes knew they could get a laugh by contrasting the important-looking printing process with the dumb gefingerpoken gag.
You don't see the gefingerpoken sign on audio systems anymore, and not just because it's too big to hang on an iPod. Anyone can set type and print a sign now, using machines that cost a few hundred dollars and require virtually no training. In the 21st Century, setting a joke in type doesn't make it funny.
But grits at the Ritz is the idea behind a whole new class of entertainment, from The Real World to EBaumsWorld. We're so accustomed to the broadcast media bringing us "professional" entertainment, we can't help but laugh when we see somebody being a total dork on television!
But YouTube and its ilk are changing all that. Amateur-grade video is becoming the default, and when that happens, the media will lose their ability to bestow importance on the message (or make it funnier). We won't be able to leverage the Ritz-iness of media to make audiences pay attention to our grits, so we'll have to make better messages.
The most powerful example of a medium conferring importance on its content is books. It's at the core of how I define publishing mojo: "For centuries books have been the vehicle for the best that human culture has to offer. . . . publishing mojo [is] the conviction that what we are making is valuable, and deserves all the care and creativity we can muster." Every 21st-Century publisher's mission statement should include learning to create value in a world where value is no longer derived from the laborious book manufacturing process.

Go ahead, show 'em your a__

At the 2007 conference of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers (AACRAO), Anne Valentine, the president of SmartCatalog, gave some suggestions on how to reduce the cost of printing course catalogs. Most were just common sense (cut your page count, use lighter paper, get competitive bids), but one was practically heresy to many of the admissions staffers in the audience. Don't just spend less, she told them, sell advertising and make your catalog pull its own weight.
Anne had uttered the unmentionable A-word. To accept advertising is to wear the scarlet letter of intellectual prostitution.
I was reminded of Anne's session by an article in the May 29 Rolling Stone, "Rock's New Economy: Making Money When CDs Don't Sell." For the baby boomers who launched Rolling Stone, the rock music brand was defined by flipping off the corporate suits. When John Sebastian sang a McDonald's commercial, millions wailed, John, you were at Woodstock! How could you sell out like that?
That was then. Now, writes RS reporter Fred Goodman, "Album sales are down 25% since 2000 . . . but smart artists and managers are finding new ways to reach fans and make money." Goodman cites a six-figure deal that "paired Robert Plant and Alison Krauss' 'Killing the Blues' with the TV ad for American Living, Ralph Lauren's new clothing line for JC Penney." The dude from Led Zep is pimpin' for JC Penney? Total bummer!
That self-righteousness is starting to erode. Some of the players in the emerging media matrix (PublishingMojo, May 17) have traditionally been paid by advances and royalties (books, movies, and music), while others (magazines, newspapers, television, and radio) have sold advertising to let audiences get the content free, or at least cheap. As long as book, movie, and music consumers had to shoulder the entire cost of the delivery module (book, DVD, CD), the publishers and studios could claim that the absence of advertising was proof of artistic integrity.
But free-or-cheap content is now the norm, and like college admissions officers, the royalty-driven media have to question the reasons they still resist advertising:

• They have an overdeveloped sense of fairness: If I say yes to Pete's Pizza, how can I say no to Sadie's Strip Joint and Gus's Gun Shop? It's easier than you think. The First Amendment doesn't guarantee anyone the right to use your vehicle for their ad.
• They fear conflict of interest, real or apparent: What if Acme Auto Service threatens to pull their ad unless we give them the maintenance contract on our fleet of vehicles? Do what any other businessperson would do: Either call their bluff or give them the contract.

And the publishers and studios may not have to sacrifice as much integrity as they think. After all, the gold standard of journalistic objectivity in the US is The New York Times, and they print all the advertising that fits.

Demotivational speaker

Harris DeWese stepped up to the lectern and took off his sport coat. He pointed to his gaudy suspenders and grinned, "You can see I'm in investment banking."
The scene was the Colonnade Hotel in Boston, the annual meeting of Bookbuilders of Boston (on whose Board of Directors I serve). We had finished the evening's business, and were settling back with our dessert and coffee to enjoy DeWese's presentation. He writes an irreverent column called "DeWese on Sales" that has appeared monthly in Printing Impressions magazine for over 20 years, and which he has anthologized in a popular book called Now Get Out There and Sell Something! Printers have often hired him as a sales coach and trainer.
I hadn't read his column or books, so I was prepared for anything, except what we got. DeWese's shtick is that he's the Mañana Man, the sales guy who beats his quota before lunch and spends the afternoon at the track. He shuns PowerPoint polish and bullet points, and instead digresses about baseball, cooking, and parallel parking before he gets down to business.
When he got down to business, it was a splash of cold water. He doesn't sell printing anymore, he sells printing companies, and as his suspenders attest, business is booming. As Chairman and CEO of Compass Capital Partners, he's put 135 of them on the block. "Printing companies rarely emerge from Chapter 11 or Chapter 7," he observed.
The folks in the room who work for small-to-medium companies made mental notes to check Monster.com first thing in the morning. But I wasn't worried, I work for an $11 billion company. We buy other printers, they don't buy us.
Then DeWese sharpened his focus from printing in general to his audience's specialty, book manufacturing. He displayed his knowledge of the turf by mentioning the "Michigan Mafia," the cluster of book printers in the Ann Arbor area. He talked about selling to specific segments of the book market (long-run, short-run, etc.), and then, almost as an afterthought, he delivered the showstopper: "If print buyers are directed by their managers to buy only on price, there's not much the salesperson can do."
Doesn't he know that most book manufacturing buyers haven't looked at anything but price for the last decade? In the US, technology has pretty much leveled the playing field as far as quality and turn times, so publishers see price as the only variable. And overseas competition has so skewed the price variable that publishers often concede quality and turn time just to drive down unit cost.
It's no better for commercial printers. Their work has become a commodity because supply dwarfs demand as many printed documents, such as catalogs and annual reports, migrate to the Internet.
According to DeWese, in a reverse auction the salesperson gets screwed. That's not a radical idea, but it's a mighty demotivating thing to say to people whose customers believe devoutly in reverse auctions. Unless you're trying to motivate them to sell their businesses.

Students and silos: Thoughts on graphic-arts education

Over on the Print CEO Blog last week, Brian Regan and I traded comments on Adam Dewitz's post about educating the next generation of printing industry leaders. The elephant in the (virtual) room was the fear that there won't be any printing industry for the next generation to lead.
As President of the Society of Printers from 1995-1997 and of Bookbuilders of Boston from 2004-2007, I was an ex-officio member of the Printing and Publishing Council of New England. The PPCNE was once an influential group, promoting the interests of a dozen graphic-arts organizations in the Boston area. Mergers and acquisitions, overseas competition, and the growth of other media have diminished the printing and publishing industries, so now PPCNE's primary role is the stewardship of a substantial scholarship endowment (in the low seven figures). The Council, as its members call it, administers its own scholarship program: They review students' applications and decide which ones will receive scholarships.
When I attended Council meetings, the constant refrain was the shrinking pool of qualified applicants. "Qualified" in this case means students from New England enrolled in degree-granting programs leading to careers in printing or publishing (not just graphic design, and certainly not web design).
This line of conversation drove me nuts. What college kid would get on a vocational track dedicated to an industry where each year, a thousand US companies either are swallowed up by bigger companies or simply sell their presses for scrap and close down?
No amount of scholarship money will motivate kids to learn skills that fewer and fewer employers need. Yes, we still need printers, and we always will, but it's no longer useful to think of putting ink on paper as an isolated activity. 21st Century printing is one part of an industrial matrix that includes all the ways we distribute and display words, sounds, and images. This matrix includes book and magazine publishing, music, television, movies, games, telecom, Internet, direct mail marketing, packaging, and signage.
Industry and colleges must embrace this change together. Both must break down the silos that impede the formation of this media matrix. Industry must create career paths that cross obsolete boundaries, and colleges must create curricula to prepare graduates to thrive in a world where ideas matter more than the channels they flow through.
And organizations like the Print and Graphics Scholarship Foundation and the Printing and Publishing Council of New England must use their scholarship money to enable this evolution, not to resist it.