A powerful inkjet imprinting system has turned Guy Forester into an ad hoc marketing manager for his contract printing customers.

“There’s no end to the flow of ideas. We keep on coming up with new ways to use it,” says the general manager of UK contract printer CN Newsprint, of the Kodak technology which prints variable data onto newspaper pages at normal press speeds.

And he makes no secret of why he persuaded bosses in the family-owned Carlisle newspaper company to invest in the system: “Classified advertising is down 30 per cent, and the contract print market is ridiculously competitive,” he says. “We wanted a way of differentiating ourselves.”

Installed on CN’s eight-tower KBA Comet press, the Kodak S20 printhead images a strip 105 mm wide anywhere across the single-width web. And quality – 600 x 300dpi mono at the Comet’s 60,000cph (or 600x600 at 35,000cph) – distinguishes it from other systems, including the Domino technology CN had tried in earlier years. In fact, it’s so good some readers have mistaken the variable inkjet data for part of the offset-printed page surrounding it.

Inkjet imprinting is popular in commercial web, transactional and packaging applications – Kodak’s Choon Keong Gan says there are more than 500 single-head installations worldwide of the company’s various inkjet technology generations, and almost 100 Stream heads in the Asia Pacific – but its take-up among newspapers has been slower.

But Forester, who spoke at WAN-Ifra’s Publish Asia conference in Bangkok, believes it will snowball: “Suddenly every copy is different, and we can do that with no decrease in printing speed, no waste, and the running cost is only pence per thousand,” he says.

“We did a flyer for Kodak photo stores, with 1.3 million copies personalised with addresses, maps and a barcode for 67 different locations. Stopping for a plate change for each of those would have been very expensive.”

Apart from contract work, there have been a range of experiments for CN Group newspapers – the flagship ‘Cumberland News’ is one of two dailies and five weekly newspapers, and the company owns three radio stations.

These have included supermarket flyers with redeemable barcoded coupons, bingo games with prefilled sets of numbers – and the possibility of a ‘live game’ – and an insert for a local racecourse sold wholly on the concept of a £250,000 ticket giveaway draw.

A car dealer is looking at a promotion based on unique numberplates, and the publisher has dummied up a page of targetted local advertisements, “effectively selling the same space five or ten times over,” Forester says.

“We’re taking our first small steps, but the opportunities are enormous. Online gaming, for example, was one of the biggest growth markets in the UK last year, and we can leverage directly into it.”

What he is finding, is that with no organised sharing of ideas, marketing the concept is difficult and frequently it is CN’s contract printing business which raises the opportunities available. A prize in an the Xplor awards and a second place in a BPIF competition have helped spread the message, but Forester says he is hoping the idea will catch on among newspapers around the world, “and we’ll all be able to share in the experiences.”