Keynote: Trends in Modern Communication
Man is a social animal
and communication is the social adhesive that makes co-existence possible. As
old as this awareness of the importance of communication is, the HOW of
communication has changed drastically.
The presentation covers
several fundamental changes: how consumers have been using media in recent
years, what channels they prefer, how they exchange information and under what
conditions media are used. These trends significantly influence how consumers
access, handle and process documents. Decades-long established processes in
customer and business-to-business communication are being put to the test. As
digitalization creeps into daily life and newer generations come along, we are
witnessing the genesis of an evolution.
In particular, printed communication
has felt the impact. To avoid becoming irrelevant, print has to build a bridge
to meet the new requirements media pose. Personalization, on-demand printing,
linking to e-content, hybrid mail and e-post are greatly gaining in importance.
It's time to step up to the challenge and lay the groundwork for the future.
Ralf Schlözer, InfoTrends
As Director of the On-Demand Printing and
Publishing Service, Ralf Schlözer is responsible for all publications, studies
and market surveys for digital production printing in Europe. The service's
main areas of investigation are the use and market potential of digital
production printing and influential factors such as technological advances,
economic conditions, and the use of printed products.
Ralf Schlözer has over twenty
years of experience in the graphics industry. Prior to his position at
InfoTrends, he worked for manroland in research, product planning and product
marketing for DI and toner systems. He
is the author of numerous studies, journal articles and presentations. Schlözer
has a graduate engineering degree in print technology and management from the
University of the Arts in Berlin and an M.S. in graphics arts systems from the
Rochester Institute of Technology (R.I.T.) in the USA.