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His statue sits in the lobby, his image adorns the walls and, in Angel Llewellyn’s office, there is a large cardboard cut-out of him. For employees of Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, Spider-Man is ubiquitous at the moment, and he will continue to be until the third instalment of the global blockbuster movie franchise hits the shops this month.

The autumn launch will mark the end of 12 months in which Llewellyn, Sony’s head of marketing services, helped to turn a limited number of approved images into a highly successful and eye-catching campaign.

Home entertainment
The campaign relied heavily on print technology, which was great news for Llewellyn because not only is she a comic-book aficionado, but she is also a print geek. Despite starting out as an accountant, Llewellyn is steeped in print – her mother has worked in a reprographics department for more than 25 years and Llewellyn herself has been involved in print for about 15 years. She has worked in the home entertainment industry for 10 years and her CV also includes a spell as a creative consultant for a Saudi prince.

While it is clear that she loves her job, things can sometimes be tough for her and her team because of factors outside of her control. This is where print comes to the fore. “Sometimes we have to make the best of artwork that may not be fantastic, but with various different bits of print, and print techniques, we can make it fantastic,” she says. “It helps that I have the best creative studio managers in the industry.”

Llewellyn cites the example of the DVD release of the last Bond film, Casino Royale. She was supplied only one image – “Daniel Craig in a suit looking gorgeous”– but the campaign worked a dream because the single image meant that in-store, the film had conformity across the different types of media.

“We totally dominated the stores” she says. “We had only one image, but it had the ‘oh my god’ factor.”
Where Llewellyn is more fortunate than other buyers is in her print spend. Though she is not prepared to specify details, it is clear that it runs into many millions, given that Sony Pictures’ home entertainment division typically prints 30m DVD sleeves alone per year.  

Much of this budget goes on point-of-sale (PoS), DVD packaging and outdoor posters. Sony also conducts online direct marketing and aims to expand into printed mailings because research suggested that customers would be open to this form of contact.

In terms of the print volumes churned out for individual promotional drives, with typical 16-week lead times, DVD sleeve inlays might run from 1.5m to 2m and that’s before you get to things such as PoS and any special packaging. The scary thing is this colossal amount accounts for only the first month’s shipment.

Shopping list
So given the huge volumes involved, what comes top of Llewellyn’s shopping list when she is placing her print jobs? “Sony wants to get the best possible value for money and just because something is the cheapest doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s the best quality,” she says. “Quality comes first – it has to. We are not going to release something just because it’s cheap.”

This quest for quality is crucial to Llewellyn due to the nature of the industry that she works in. “We always refer to our products as products – but they’re not,” she explains. “They are Hollywood glitz and glamour and, as a result, we look for inspiration at the luxury high-end such as perfume packaging, which is at the cutting-edge of printing techniques.” Another ‘must’ is colour quality. “Spider-Man has a distinct colour palette that we must stick to. His latest costume was more of a blue red rather than an orange red, which made him appear more grown up. With Spider-Man, we have to get the colour spot on.”

As a result of these demands, Llewellyn has to press-pass Spider-Man work, though generally speaking she leaves the job to the printers, in whom she places a lot of trust. “We rely on our printers to be brand guardians for us,” she says.

Sony works with a handful of carefully selected printers employed on a “loyalty basis” rather than fixed contracts.

These include the likes of AGI, St Ives, Dialogue Solutions, Leycol, SPS Group, Hope & Clarke Stephens and Italian company Pozzoli. “I have built up a relationship with these printers over many years and like to consider them my friends,” says Llewellyn.

While this relationship is based heavily on trust, it is not to say that she doesn’t undertake regular audits. Llewellyn has recently undertaken an environmental study with all of Sony’s suppliers, as the firm is aware of the fact that it sources a lot of print and wants to reassure customers that it is all responsibly sourced. Llewellyn also audits for factors such as cost-effectiveness and turnaround times. When asked whether she had considered using a print management company, her response is emphatic. “No. Never in a million years. We don’t need to. We have three of the best in the industry working at Sony and what they don’t know about print isn’t worth knowing. We know how much things cost, so why go to a third party?”

On the green front, the company is already committed to reducing the impact of its business on the environment. It will be using its know-how of green printing techniques to promote the animation film Surf’s Up, which will be released in a DVD box set that is 100% environmentally friendly.

“We want to use Surf’s Up to show parents and kids we care about the environment and it’s the perfect title for us to win their hearts at an early age,” says Llewellyn. “We need to get as green as possible and give them a clear plan of what we want to do. With Surf’s Up, we can take a really good film and show kids that we are doing a good thing as well.”

Sony has already made inroads in this area. All the paper it uses is sustainable, including recyclable plastic. Llewellyn is also investigating the use of a wide range of environmentally friendly DVD trays. One is paper foam mixed with potato starch that’s 100% recyclable, while another is made from
papier-mâché. She also plans to move some work to stochastic printing because it uses less ink, making the process much greener.

But this green agenda doesn’t mean that Llewellyn and Sony will forgo print in the future. “Print is only going to get bigger because we are coming up with more demand from our customers to create new ideas and incentives,” she says.

And with further blockbusters of Spider-Man’s ilk in the pipeline at Sony, Llewellyn looks set to be calling on all of her print know-how in the future.

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CASE STUDY: SPIDERMAN 3
When Sony decided it wanted an attention-grabbing free incentive for the DVD launch of Spider-Man 3 on Play.com, it turned to BPIF innovation-award winner Dialogue Solutions to conjure up something that fitted the bill.

Angel Llewellyn hooked up with Dialogue sales director Andy Bailey, to address the question of how the firm could sell more pre-released products. Bailey came up with the idea of creating a personalised Spider-Man poster for all pre-orders placed on Play.com, with Dialogue managing the web, data and on-demand printing on the film’s release.

The proposed package would allow customers to put their own messages on the poster and then view a ripped PDF proof for approval. While Sony would ultimately vet all messages, one of the main benefits for the firm was that it would allow it to capture data on its customers. And the on-demand nature of the job meant there would be no wastage. As soon as Sony gave the idea the green light, Dialogue had to start from scratch, writing all its own software to create a web portal within 48 hours. While this tested Bailey and his team, the result was clearly worth it.

When the incentive was launched, Play.com noticed a rise in sales, with 6,000 DVD-poster packages ordered by the end of August – a month and a half before the DVD’s release.

Another fillip for Sony is the sheer print quality of the posters, which will be produced on a Xerox iGen3. “Sony made it clear from the start it would only use the technology if the brand integrity was to remain intact in terms of quality. That was the main challenge,” says Bailey.

On inspecting a poster, it is clear that the challenge was met. Sony already plans to roll this idea out across future DVD releases.

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SONY PICTURES HOME ENTERTAINMENT
• (SPHE) is the home video distribution arm of Sony Pictures Entertainment, a subsidiary of Sony Corporation
• The UK division of SPHE is the largest outside the US. In addition to the Spider-Man franchise, the firm was also behind DVD launches such as The Da Vinci Code and Casino Royale
• A major growth area for Sony is the sale of Blu-ray discs – the next-generation optical disc format offers more than five times the storage capacity of traditional DVDs