The PRINTING United Digital Experience

The first day of the PRINTING United Digital Experience—a three-week-long virtual event for product announcements, exhibitor showcases, and educational opportunities—is drawing to a close. In what is fast becoming a theme during COVID, show organizers have been forced to explore virtual engagements and redefine what an industry event looks like in 2020. For PRINTING United, this has meant extending the format from a three-day in-person event into a 14-day online event with four hours of vertically focused content each day. Each day will highlight a different community, and the first day kicked off with a focus on Graphics/Wide Format. In addition to an industry outlook and keynote, there were two educational sessions and seven vendor product presentations.

Coming off the success of last year’s in-person PRINTING United, expectations for this event are high. Last year’s event spanned six halls and 720,000 square feet of exhibition space at the Kay Bailey Hutchinson Convention Center in downtown Dallas, Texas. Over 30,000 attendees mingled with over 600 exhibitors to see, touch, and hear about the latest industry innovations. In addition to garnering insight from educational sessions, attendees enjoyed old-fashioned networking last October. Although a digital experience cannot hit those same metrics, this event benefits from the long tail of the Internet. Print service providers can register for free, avoid the cost of travel, and consume the content on their own terms. Hopefully, this will give print shop owners an opportunity to give staff members who normally would not get to attend in-person events the chance to learn.

We at Keypoint Intelligence are quite excited to cover and participate in the PRINTING United Digital Experience. Our directors for the Wide Format and Production Workflow services, Eric Zimmerman and Ryan McAbee, will present the keynote on October 30th at 10:15AM EST. This session, which is geared toward producers of wide format sign and display graphics, will provide insights for building a manufacturing mindset. Our team members will highlight some fresh revenue and application data gathered throughout the pandemic in cooperation with Big Picture magazine, providing actionable steps that wide format shops can take to implement automation and transform into a manufacturing mindset.

Many industry leading vendors and new technologies will be presented during the PRINTING Untied digital experience. Several of this year’s vendors were also recent recipients of Keypoint Intelligence’s inaugural Outstanding Innovation Awards in Production Print (presented on October 5th). These awards were evaluated by our expert production printing analysts, who among them have dozens of years’ experience evaluating production-print products and analyzing market trends. The entries were judged on three key metrics: how groundbreaking or unique the product or innovation was, its likely impact on the market segment it addressed, and the expected timeline for availability in the market.

2021 Outstanding Innovation Awards in Production Print

Note: Not all products are sold in all regions.

If 2020 has taught us anything, it is the need to adapt and persevere. It has also highlighted a collective resolve and a will to confront challenges. Like many other virtual industry events this year, PRINTING United will give us an opportunity to learn, apply, and test new strategies so we can evolve and reach the other side of this pandemic. As it has done in the past, the industry will transition and remain a vibrant and valuable part of the communications mix. With any luck, we’ll be able to look forward to an in-person gathering next October at PRINTING United 2021 in Orlando, Florida.

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