Trend Outlook: Prepress as a Source of Revenue in the Agency

Excerpt from an original article by Ed Burgoyne

In the past, advertising agencies have spent a significant amount of their client’s money purchasing outside prepress services. Today’s trend is to offer these services as an extension to the agency’s traditional in-house “studio.” More than ever, services such as high-end scanning, retouching, proofing and final disk release are being offered directly by the agency’s internal production and studio departments.

Although the agency will need to make a financial decision and staffing investment to ensure the success of adding prepress services in-house, many agencies have found that the costs of bringing these services in-house can quickly pay for themselves. With a proper plan, agencies can see an immediate difference in how much revenue the agency’s production department is taking in versus paying out to vendors.

Why take on prepress?

Almost 100% of today’s magazine publishers accept some form of digital file along with a “swop approved” digital proof instead of traditional film & matchprints for print advertising. This change, from producing traditional film to producing a press ready file, has created an environment conducive for prepress services to be offered at the agency level. Advertising agency’s have embraced the trend of shifting traditional color house work to in-house departments due to the significantly reduced level of investment needed to produce such services.

Advances in digital technology have continued to evolve the way advertising agencies and publishers work together. During the past three years magazines and newspapers have completed a major transformation in the way they produce their publications. Publishers and printers have fully embraced direct-to-plate technology. By going direct-to-plate, companies have eliminated the use and expense of traditional film used to produce traditional photo-sensitive printing plates. As of January 1, 2004, over 90% of all magazine and newspaper publishers will no longer accept film for adwork or use film to produce plates for printing.

In the place of film as the traditional medium, publishers and printers are now requesting specific types of files for agency ad submissions. Although some magazines do take native files such as Quark, there is a trend towards the acceptance of specific file types such as uniquely prepared pdf files. Pdf-X (and to a lesser extent TIFF-IT) files are becoming the accepted standard format for digital ad submission in almost 70% of SRDS listed magazine titles.

Both Tiff-IT and Pdf-X are special files that are generated specifically for pre-press. These files have special trapping, color and unique information that normal Tiff or PDF files do not contain. While producing these files requires specific software and equipment, in some cases, agencies have been successful in training their existing studio staff in how to properly create these files. Depending on the scale of work being created in-house, additional investments in both software and equipment may be needed. Many agencies are also seeing a significant return on investment by having a high end proofing device on premises. Lastly, the roles and job descriptions of the production managers and studio personnel will need to change adapt to the new workload and workflow demands. New agency procedures and general workflow would need to be created.

With the evolution away from film and towards electronic files, many agencies have seen this transition as an opportunity to add additional revenue to the agency’s bottom line.

Learn more on how your agency can benefit from adding prepress services, Contact Ed.