Careers in Print: Outside the Print Shop

[00:00:00] Pat McGrew: Hey, it’s Pat McGrew and Ryan McAbee, and we’re here with another episode of The Print University. And this time we are talking about careers in print outside of the core print shop. Because the thing about the print industry, Ryan, is that there are a lot of jobs that people don’t realize are part of our industry.

And it’s important to understand the whole ecosystem, because it might be that you don’t want to be a press operator. You might not want to be a color management expert, but you might still be intrigued enough by print to want to know where else you can fit. That’s what we’re going to try and talk about in this episode.

[00:00:39] Ryan McAbee: Yeah, a hundred percent. We’ve spent some episodes talking about all the different roles and how they’re varied even in the print shop, everything, from the customer support representative to, like you said, the color specialist and so on. But then there’s these other kinds of positions that orbit around print that usually are companies outside of the print shop. And that’s really what we want to focus on today. The three top ones that we’re going to talk about really are the print broker, the design/ad agency and print buyers. They all in different sort of ways, ultimately interface and work with people at the print service provider or the print shop.

 First, how would you define how each one of these are similar, but also different? 

[00:01:21] Pat McGrew: They’re all involved in the business of print, right? So that, that’s the notice, how they relate to a print service provider, but they they each are specialists in their own right.

Print brokers are people who are specializing in helping people buy print who are not print buying professions, right? They often work with, manufacturing companies retailers, all sorts of companies that have a need for print but maybe it’s an irregular need for print, right? Once a year, they need holiday calendars or something. Alternatively, there are organizations that have simply recognized that they’re never going to get everything handled and packaged up and delivered in the way they want if they try to do everything themselves. They use a professional who has a lot of print relationships who can place their work with the right printer at the right price with the right turnaround time for them. Print brokers fill a really interesting need. 

Design and ad agencies sometimes are their own print broker. Sometimes a design agency will decide that they might be building a multi channel campaign that has print elements and e-elements, and it may even have a lot of print elements. Banners hanging from helicopters, or stadium signage, movie posters. There’s all sorts of things that they might be doing, as well as direct mail components, as well as mailed collateral components. It might even have packaging components. 

That agency knows that they have two ways that they can do things. They can either have an internal print broker who buys the print where they need to buy it, or they might engage a print broker to help them get everything placed, which is why we have that line going in that direction.

Print buyers are interesting professionals. They might be independent, they might be inside of an organization. A print buyer might work for a brand, right? Kellogg’s. Mondelez, Ford… 

[00:03:20] Ryan McAbee: Any of those big brands, right? 

[00:03:22] Pat McGrew: Everybody. And in fact most of them do have people who are professional print buyers in that organization. They are the people who are responsible for getting the, all the print that might be designed from their agency, might be internally designed into a print environment so that it can be delivered back to them and put into use. 

The other group of print buyers some are specialists, right? Some specialize in, stadium printing, and others specialize in direct mail printing, and others specialize in even transaction printing. There are print buyers who specialize in placing things like your mortgage statement and your bank statement. 

 Then there are independent print buyers who work with a lot of different kinds of organizations because they’ve got a Rolodex of relationships that allow them to get that print placed at the right place in time. Difference between a print buyer and a print broker is, the devil’s in the details.

[00:04:21] Ryan McAbee: I think it’s a scale thing too, right? Like typically print brokers work with a lot of companies, whereas a print buyer may either work with one single company, their own company, or just that handful. 

[00:04:31] Pat McGrew: Yeah and they know the needs of their constituency and they’re intimately familiar with it, much more expert in it.

Whereas a print broker is trying to be all things to all people. 

[00:04:42] Ryan McAbee: Very good point. The other thing I would just take from this graphic here is if you’re on the print service provider side, it’s always good to figure out who the ultimate end customer is. Because in the most complex chain that we have here, the originator could be the print buyer who’s then going through the design ad agency to create the, do the creative part, and then who is then going through the print broker to source the print. Sometimes that creates a complex, more complex communication chain to actually execute the work, right? 

[00:05:11] Pat McGrew: It does, it can be very complex and if something goes wrong, there’s a lot of fingers pointing in a lot of directions.

[00:05:19] Ryan McAbee: Absolutely. When you talk about the superpowers that these type of roles really require, what do they really excel at? What is their core skill set they’re bringing to the table? Let’s start with the print buyer first. I think one of the key things for them is that if they’re a print buyer within their own organization, they know that organization well.

Intimately, and they understand all the different types of print products that are needed throughout the life cycle, the calendar year, the life cycle of a product, et cetera, et cetera. They understand the brand styles and the brand details that have to be maintained.

It’s all of that kind of intimate knowledge that they bring in kind of a decoder ring, if you will, to make sure that they can translate the business need for the print and the marketing and whatever else into, the specifications that we actually need for this print job. This one print job out of many that we have for the year.

[00:06:07] Pat McGrew: The print buyer is very often also, a print quality expert. 

[00:06:11] Ryan McAbee: Yes. 

[00:06:12] Pat McGrew: They are very often the first bridge you’ve got across in getting an approval to say, not only the soft approval, but then the final work, they will typically want to see it before they release it out into their ecosystem.

 They’ve got the expertise to understand the different print technologies. They understand what those print technologies are capable of and what they’re not capable of. They understand if they’re asking for different kinds of embellishments they’ve got the level of expertise to understand the difference between, cold foiling and digital embellishment. What happens when you use different kinds of print substrates. They understand The different substrates they understand the different papers and vinyls and coroplast and all the other things that someone might print on. 

They very often are the person that holds the budget for the print job. They’ve been told that this job has to come in here. So as they’re getting bids either from the printers that they do business with, on a regular basis, or if it’s a special kind of project and they’re going outside of their core set, they know what they can spend and they are the person that you’re going to have to get past if you want to win that job.

[00:07:25] Ryan McAbee: If you want to be a print buyer, the skill sets that immediately come to mind for me are, you need to be organized because you’re going to be carrying on multiple projects at once and coordinating that information between all the constituents on your print buyer side at your company level, but also communicating with all the print service providers that are actually fulfilling the work.

 Then you need to really be detail oriented because when you’re looking at the final product and output, like you said, doing kind of the proving and approvals process, if that colon is supposed to be a period you’re expected to pick up on that kind of detail. 

[00:07:58] Pat McGrew: You end up becoming a walking encyclopedia of the capabilities of the printers you work with.

And in order to be that walking encyclopedia, you have to be in constant touch with them. You have to understand when they change equipment. When they upgrade equipment, they change finishing equipment. Sometimes, they change the provider. They change vendors for the equipment they’re using, which could impact the kind of print that’s possible. The print quality, the print options that are possible. You end up having to be that person as well. You become the walking encyclopedia of all the local printers and all the national printers you work with. Print buyers often they’ll work with local printers, but sometimes they also work with trade printers.

 We’ve talked about trade printers in other episodes that they have a lot of options in who they can work with. So they tend to want to work with people who are going to turn around the work for them reliably, consistently every single time. 

[00:08:53] Ryan McAbee: That’s right. Let’s transition a little bit to the design and advertising agencies. And what are their superpowers look like when they’re in those kinds of roles? 

[00:09:01] Pat McGrew: Agencies are an interesting animal because they come in a lot of different sizes. There are boutique agencies that only do one kind of work and then there are big global agencies that will do absolutely anything you want for you.

 Typically they’re the people who are watching trends. They are the people who care about the Pantone color of the year. I might not but they absolutely do. 

[00:09:27] Ryan McAbee: You didn’t like the lilac color from a year or two ago? 

[00:09:30] Pat McGrew: Yeah, exactly. They definitely care about those things. They’re watching consumer trends but they’re also watching Within certain markets, what the trends are. They know the difference between retailer needs in the Southeast U. S. versus the Northwest U. S. They typically will understand or have access to data that helps them define the kinds of work, the kinds of advertising, marketing, collateral that’s going to help grow their constituents, their clients business.

They are however organizations that have high turnover as a rule. Interestingly, especially around the design and print aspects of an agency. Very often, people are contracted into an agency For specific campaigns and projects, and then when that one’s done, they’re out on the market looking for the next gig.

 The people in those organizations, you might be dealing with somebody who’s seen everything and done everything and you might be dealing with somebody who’s not seen everything and done everything. The level of expertise that would be ideal in those agencies is somebody who is very knowledgeable about their clients requirements understands the different options available for the different kinds of campaigns. They might want to run. 

They are absolutely the people who are going to be the brand police as we like to call them. Most major brands and a lot of even mid tier brands have brand guidelines and those books can be pretty interesting. If you’ve ever looked at one, they’re specifying specific colors to be used in specific ways. They specify how logos can and can’t be used. What colors can and can’t be used with near the logos. How much white space has to be around them. There are a lot of specifics in those brand guidelines, and these agencies are responsible for co-developing those with their clients and then enforcing them when they send work out to be printed.

[00:11:31] Ryan McAbee: The other tip to consider is not, and it’s a little bit because of the attrition challenge that you mentioned before, but it seems like the generational changes that have happened and newer people coming into the design ad space, they are designed for digital first mindset and skill set. You might have to spend time educating them on the basics of print and the fundamentals of print, like the fact that, if you’re running on an analog press, you need trapping. And this is why, because that’s foreign to them. So I would say that’s another thing to keep in mind.

 Let’s go on to the final one that’s in this orbit around print, which is the print broker. The graphic here, it reminds me of the Octoman, Spider Man character. It’s almost like you, as a print broker, you need multiple sets of hands because everything’s going on with a bunch of different clients at once it seems. 

[00:12:19] Pat McGrew: A successful print broker is probably juggling anywhere from 20 to 40 clients. They are, they have relationships with, as many as 100 different printing companies of all different sizes, shapes, and specialties. A print broker, even if they specialize in certain areas, they need access to other kinds of printing because they never know when their customer is going to come to them and say, ” I know we’ve been doing window graphics for the last 20 years, but we want to add some in store signage and we want to add, oh, those cute little pamphlets that sit at the cash register. We want to add some of those now.” you’ve got to have somebody in your world who’s going to be able to do that for them and do it for them at the price that they’ll find attractive. We like to say jack of all trades and master of none. These guys have to be jack of all trades and master pretty much all of them. In order to really be successful.

I know a lot of print brokers and I’ve worked with print brokers for years and the people who do it well, just love that variability. They love being able to place just the right up with the right customer. That just gives them joy. When they retire, their clients often find it difficult to replace them because most of the print brokers I know, aren’t training up the next generation behind them.

 Very often, these are independent agents who just they know everybody. They know all the vendors. They know all the printers. They know their clients really well. They serve them really well. It’s going to be interesting to watch the next 5 or 10 years as there are more and more print broker retirements to see who comes up and fills the gaps.

We have seen agencies start to build themselves as being both the design agency and the print broker as some of their key feeders, print brokering feeders have left the industry. 

[00:14:11] Ryan McAbee: I feel like the print broker probably would have a really good skill set like something they would enjoy outside of work is putting together puzzles because I think that is right.

It’s like we’re trying to delicately take all this criteria and find a perfect match on the other side. And it’s that kind of way of thinking that really attracts people to this kind of role. 

[00:14:31] Pat McGrew: They would be a candidate for the game show Lego Masters. 

[00:14:35] Ryan McAbee: I haven’t watched that, but I should. 

[00:14:35] Pat McGrew: Oh, that one’s good. Where you actually, you get assigned, build a boat that will actually float with Legos and you have, Oh, three hours go. And it’s very interesting, but it’s that kind of thing where, yeah it’s that kind of skill set of being able to Tetris things together and make everything come out at the right price and at the right time for the clients that you’re serving and with the print quality that they demand.

[00:14:57] Ryan McAbee: This is an interesting little sub orbital world around. We hope you’ve enjoyed this episode and will join us again next time at the Print University.