Smithers: What is the value for a brand owner or retailer to accelerate a concept to market?
Mark Etwaru: A reduced time-to-market can bring immediate outcomes such as increasing margin revenue. Consider the more you are responsive to the market needs the greater your revenue will be as your product cycles are shorter allowing you to a) meet the market demands and b) increase your market share by delivering ahead of your competitors.
Smithers: What are you most looking forward to hearing about at Digital Print for Packaging US 2019?
Mark Etwaru: I am looking forward to see how companies are leveraging technology to transform traditional processes into Digital first processes and learn of the successes and failures along the journey
Smithers: Tell us how you were able to leverage digital technology in the Smirnoff Vodka Pride Pack Campaign
Barry Sanel: Digital printing allowed Diageo to realize the stretching design intent of printing a rainbow on our packaging and variable pictures which is extremely difficult to do with traditional forms of printing. We were able to leverage the shrink-sleeve and corrugated shipper suppliers’ digital printing technologies to further enhance the design intent, by moving the positioning of the rainbow and photographs of couples from bottle to bottle and shipper to shipper. It’s just simply something that could not be done without digital.
Smithers: What was the biggest benefit of using digital on Diageo packaging?
Barry Sanel: One of the greatest added benefit has been the ability to ideate using the actual equipment that will be used for production. We are able to not only manage brands expectations of what the final product is actually going to look like, but enhance the designs as provided by agencies. The second benefit is development time is reduced from conventional proofing and printing processes.
Smithers: What would you say is the biggest hurdle in implementation of Digital with CPGs?
Luis Arevalo: Cost, Logistics, packaging validation testing
Smithers: How were you able to break barriers at Colgate-Palmolive, and move the needle with digital printing?
Luis Arevalo: I sold the project showing the stakeholders the main advantage of Digital Print technology creating excitement among them.
