2014 Hot Markets: Packaging, Pharma Head List

Insurance and investment banking will intensely market both risk and wealth management using production digital VDP and PURLs for 1:1 direct stimulus-response delivery, bound instructional documents and hyper-personalized presentations. Conventional static newsletters, offering-circulars and other narrow web and sheetfed work, will remain flat as these sectors install in-plant production digital capabilities for security and control.

Now to the three durable goods sectors: No. 7 Real Estate ($2.0T, +5 percent; with $10.4B to print, -3 percent) is foreclosing on our medium even as it is recovering. Residential new and resale housing is building with promotion principally to the so-called "millennial" generation, which does not search using reflective copy.

Only among renters and retirees are web-produced guides and newspaper/magazine ROP and inserts cost-effective and, as these demographics are declining in the housing marketplace, volumes are falling—forever. In luxury estate residential, condominiums and commercial real estate, digital view-books with personalization in multiple languages is growing along with excess property for sale. Signs are hanging in there, though now with QR codes hinged to them.

Automotive ($2.0T, +6 percent; with $8.4B to print, -6 percent) is No. 9 and shifting in two directions; in forward toward a 16.5 million vehicle year, and in reverse to a drop of $0.6B in print buys.

Total print ad spending will slip below online in the New Year when the reduction of showroom print is included in the mix. ROP and insert print tanked last year as labels, décor, packaging, manuals and digital rollfed OEM (mostly in-plant) raced upward of $4.0B on increased unit production. This trend will continue to 2016 when production levels subside.

The remaining spots into which a general printer can drive are retail dealer groups (co-op sheetfed/web FSIs and wide-format digital POP), auto-traders (open-web classifieds) and auto aftermarket parts/services (retail signs, packaging, POP/POS, FSIs, labels, etc.), which will fill-up on $1.2B in ink-on-paper.