What would it take to create targeted, partly-digital print newspapers for India's buoyant newspaper market?

Concepts floated in a pre-event workshop ahead of WAN-Ifra's India conference in Kolkata touch the issues involved in matching a print product to the personal information marketers now hold about individual shoppers.

Kawal Arora, managing director of Ferag marketing arm WRH Global India, presented the Swiss postpress maker's vision of a newspaper collated with targeted preprints and personalized leaflets, based on a store's loyalty card or other data.

And also "getting personal" was Sudeep Bhattacharjee, Indian managing director for manroland web systems, which makes the only digital print finishing systems capable of keeping up with today's 300 metres/minute inkjet web presses.

"We shall see things that can't be covered by the internet, and we shall have that in India," he said of the potential of digitally-printed personalised newspapers.

The 'window of opportunity' in India is as big as any in the world, but the challenges are considerable. Newspapers here are a low-cost, high volume item with a huge market... factors which run against traditional ideas of niche, personalized publishing.

Yet the rising prosperity which is helping drive growth for newspapers could make the idea of special-purpose targeted print attractive to marketers, provided the challenge of the "last kilometre" is overcome: How to put a piece personalized for a store shopper - or a prospective car buyer, for example - into his or her hands.

And it can be done by newspaper publishers... or by direct mail specialists.

At WAN-Ifra India's post-DRUPA workshop, WRH Global's Kawal Arora took Ferag's mail collation concept of using its Navigator-driven EasySert and FlyStream products to match a printed product to the recipient's known interests - feeders and section control driven by third-party data - and applied it to a newspaper scenario.

Indian publishers are "already working on it," building on the existing distribution systems of vendors and agents: "The structure can remain the same," he says. "None of this is impossible."

Any form of mechanised inserting is a huge market opportunity for Ferag in India, where only 14 of the company's high-speed inserting systems - which are an essential packaging component for publishers in many other parts of the world - are installed. And of course, it is offering the same technology to direct mail companies and postal services.

The same arguments apply to the manroland digital finishing kit, more widely used in commercial than newspaper applications: Issues of format and product flexibility - including gluing, stitching, perforating and more - have been addressed on the FormerLine (newspaper) and FoldLine (commercial) systems, but the finished product still has to be put into the hands of the intended recipient.

In Europe, wide use of postal services for delivery makes this easier, and in some other markets, publishers own the reader relationship - as they do with digital subscriptions - even though a newsagent makes the delivery.

But while publishers in developed markets contemplate the day when they will stop printing altogether, India still looks at perhaps decades of worthwhile print publishing... making the 'window of opportunity' potentially somewhat more profitable and accessible.

Peter Coleman

Pictured: WRH Global India's Kawal Arora with samples from a personalised collated newspaper