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When it comes to promoting one of the world's premier printing exhibitions, one thing's a given: the quality of the printed marketing materials used to push the event must be of the highest possible quality. Products will be pored over by some of the keenest eyes in the world, and any misregistration, marking or dramatic drop in colour quality would be leapt upon immediately and, as a result, the event's credentials could be put in jeopardy.

This is the unenviable task faced by Nick Craig Waller, marketing director at IIR Exhibitions. You may not have heard of him, but if you’re in print, you probably will have attended one of his company’s events, whether it be Digital Print World (now Total Print! Expo), Northprint, Ipex South Asia or, the big daddy of them all, Ipex.

Craig Waller is entrenched in print and would make a fantastic ambassador for the industry. However, he’s not from a print background. He joined IIR in 2006 following spells at media companies Centaur and VNU and his role at the exhibitions organiser, which was acquired by media giant Informa in 2005, was to look after the three different strands of the IIR Exhibitions business – nutraceuticals, print and last, but by no means least, maritime and transport.

Global force
Today Craig Waller looks after shows that span the globe, from Panama to India and Brighton to Geneva, and it’s clear that although he doesn’t have print in his blood, he’s a man who is incredibly passionate about it. Ask him a question about the industry and he becomes immediately animated and waxes lyrical about print’s power to engage the consumer. For example, when quizzed about what printed items he buys on a regular basis, he immediately reels off: Brochures, leaflets, letterheads, envelopes, stickers, direct mail, posters, bags, USB sticks, pop-up stands, point of sale, before coming up for air and adding: We dip our toe into as many different types of print and formats as you can see.

Personal touch
Craig Waller’s current favourite print format is the personalised digital campaign – something he is keen to champion. He’s fully aware that a large percentage of attendees to IIR’s shows come from SMEs, so it’s always a struggle to persuade them to pay a visit. So he hit on the idea of producing personalised cheque books containing money-off vouchers for the last Digital Print World (DPW), which allowed visitors to maximise their time at the event and hooked them in to attending. Craig Waller says the use of personalised print was incredibly effective and helped to increase the pre-registration conversion rate for DPW by 8%. Somewhat unsurprisingly, he intends to roll out similar applications again in the future and he’s extremely excited by the boundless creative opportunities that the process offers, although he concedes that it costs a little more to produce work of this nature, but counters that the conversion rates justify the investment.

While cost is always an issue, Craig Waller has a fairly healthy print budget for his promotional campaigns. For example, at Ipex 2006, around 25% of the overall marketing budget went on print at a cost of roughly £200,000 and he says that typically around 15-20% of the marketing budget for exhibitions will be spent on print, with millions of pieces created for something like Ipex, down to the low thousands for sales brochures for some of the firm’s conferences.

In the UK, this work is handled by a roster of around 10 printers, but for shows held in China and India, for logistical reasons Craig Waller has to call on the services of local printers, with differing results.

Sometimes we have to compromise on quality, environmental standards are not always up to scratch and on price they might be cheaper than the UK but not dramatically so. As a result, we have to do a lot more management of these printers and often we have to go back to the start and make sure that they completely understand the brief and know what laminate or UV varnish are.

Specialist support
Thankfully printers on the firm’s UK roster know IIR’s requirements off by heart and provide Craig Waller with a dynamic skills set ranging from specialist printed graphics through to variable-data work. Regardless of their particular specialism, the common dominator is that almost all will have produced exhibition work for other companies prior to working for IIR for the first time – mainly because the sector has such exacting standards.

In the event industry, everything is driven by deadlines, says Craig Waller. We can’t afford to wait for things to dry, so we go to people with experience of printing event literature who know the deadlines involved.
Each printer is stringently audited each year on a number of different factors including the environment, which is important to the company. You have to show to your stakeholders that you are doing things in an environmentally conscious way.

As well as making great strides in cleaning up their environmental act, the refreshing news for UK Print Plc is that following decades of criticism, Craig Waller says the nation’s printers have started to listen to buyers and, as a result, have become much better at marketing themselves.
The relationship between the buyer and printers has changed and they’re [the printer] now giving something back, he explains. They’re no longer taking me down the pub and buying me a drink before saying ‘what’s the cost of your print – I’ll beat it’. They are coming to see me with a key account service.

So much so that Craig Waller says printers now fully understand his needs and are even starting to suggest ways of producing jobs that he hadn’t considered before. This sort of behaviour is music to Craig Waller’s ears as he’s always keen to try something different. In the past, we’ve been guilty of rolling things out in a regimented fashion, but it’s important to us that we try things that we haven’t done before to get our message across.

Instant impact
To illustrate the point, he says that his favourite print embellishment at the moment is spot varnish, which he feels helps things to jump off the page, and it’s this ability to create stand-out, which is incredibly important to him due to the competitive nature of the exhibition sector. We’re competing with a helluva lot of event and exhibition companies throughout the world so what we have to ask is: ‘How do I make this stand out and create a bit of quality?’

For Craig Waller, print complements and is integrated into everything he does, so somewhat unsurprisingly he’s 100% committed to it. We’re a print exhibition organiser, among other important sectors, and if we’re not doing something in print then it doesn’t make any sense. People still want to receive the printed word and nothing can be taken away from that because print is incredibly powerful. Essentially, what we are doing is marketing print’s potential.

IIR EXHIBITIONS

IIR Exhibitions was established in 1992 and specialises in the delivery of large-scale conferences and exhibitions. It is a global organisation with offices based in London, New York, Monaco and Singapore

IIR Exhibitions was bought by rival Informa in 2005 for more than £750m

The company has organised the UK print show Ipex, which takes place every four years since 1994 and became the show’s sole owner in 2006

Ipex is the second largest printing show on the planet, the largest in the English-speaking world and boasted total attendance figures in 2006 of 100,901

IPEX 2010

Sales brochure

If you do a show on print, there’s nothing worse than a crappy piece of print, says IIR Exhibitions marketing director Nick Craig Waller, while proudly brandishing the firm’s Ipex 2010 exhibitor brochure. Promotion of the UK’s biggest show kicked off in earnest at Drupa with a stand built around the creative theme of a snow globe – Ipex being the event [globe] that encapsulates the world of printing.

The personalised exhibitor brochure was the first impact piece mailed out to IIR’s top 1,000 clients two weeks after Drupa ended. The marketing collateral came in the form of a colour-coded tabular system with all of the pages in the folder starting out as A4 sheets before being cut down to size so that they mirrored a tabular system. Unique numbers and codes were printed on the brochures so that Craig Waller and his team could trace the source of any response to the literature.

The brochure was printed on an HP Indigo and using such a thick sheet pushed the machine to its limits, but Craig Waller is clearly delighted with the effect.

With Ipex, everything has got to be quality driven and this is a really nice brochure that shows off the power of print, he explains. It costs a lot more than traditional runs, but if we get a couple of bookings off the backs of this, then it pays for the print and design of the entire piece so it would have been worth it.