drupa Guided Tours

The demand for high-quality finished print products is increasing. Companies want to differentiate themselves in their communication, packaging must stand out clearly from the competition at the POS and the “outfit” of printed matter should reflect the value and image of a company or product ever more clearly.
State-of-the-art finishing techniques enable previously unimagined added value for high-quality print products.
Clients and branded companies have long been concerned with a wide range of possibilities in the print media industry. Packaging is varnished, punched, embossed and enriched with metallic effects not only to reflect the desirability of the contents but also as a value in itself. If you don’t want to get lost in communication these days, you have to stand out and differentiate yourself to achieve a clear positioning. This is both true for traditional advertising as well as for labels, packaging and other print media.
A wide range of analogue finishing technologies are already available in the market. We show you innovations for analogue print finishing, their further development and related trends.

Although a relatively new technology, some print service providers have long been active in this market – not only with timid investments, but also with production capacities in high-end quality. They are a testament to the functionality of high-speed inkjet and its increasing significance.
The foundation for this, however, are above all new business models for future-oriented, courageous and creative minds. After all, high-speed inkjet is not simply a printing process for the mass reproduction of information, but a system for individual communication in its purest form.
High-speed inkjet has already shaken a bastion of traditional printing: printed books. New editions of out-of-print titles, self-publishing, and updates are the areas where Book on Demand thrives. Since only what is actually requested is printed, high-speed inkjet is reshaping the sector of book production.
However, books are by no means the end of the story. The technology is also having a decisive impact on popular applications such as catalogues and magazines. There is still potential to be tapped in newspaper printing while mailings are unrivalled when it comes to maximum personalisation.
With its endless possibilities of individualisation, high-speed inkjet could actually herald the beginning of a completely new era in the printing industry.

Where do the millions of pages for the high-speed inkjet come from? High-speed inkjet presses are like gluttonous caterpillars: they crave food. Every day, they devour tons of white paper and slurp up hectoliters of ink. How do you feed these beasts? Our Guided Tour becomes a research trip on the trail of the food basis for the HSI. Where do the fat jobs grow? On the continent of commercial printing? In the jungle of transactional printing? In the pastures of transpromo? Or in the greenhouses of Big Data? All regions have one thing in common: the amount of feed must be large, the preparation finely granular, and the feeding continuous.

The possibilities for out-of-home and interior design are becoming increasingly diverse. In addition to a wide range of flexible and rigid substrates, a wide variety of printing processes are available to transform building facades, interiors and entire locations within a very short time - without making any structural changes. drupa is not just a showcase for technologies and materials, but an „experience playground“ of possibilities. The possibilities of a digital print fabric for walls, windows, floors, furniture to restaurant equipment speak for themselves. Among other things, you will see photographs, wall decoration, gold printing as a design element for rooms, and learn about fast branding and decoration options for furniture and the like. Everything on proven and new materials, produced with the latest printing and finishing technology. Learn more about backgrounds, experiences and recommendations from the idea to the design to the implementation in large format printing and digital printing. The tour about current digital printing technology, innovative interior design materials and the pitfalls and opportunities of an interior/exterior campaign.

Print has enormous potential in innovative printing processes for many solutions from different vertical markets. Printed Electronics offers a wide range of applications for positioning print products as interactive communication hubs. These include smart packages, intelligent packaging and commercial printing with electroluminescence and electronic components. Last but not least, special applications such as 3D printing, decor printing and functional printing are playing an increasingly important role.

Packaging printing is THE pioneer in the pursuit of sustainability in the packaging sector, being THE driver for the printing industry of the future. Experience some of the key innovations in packaging printing at first hand on our motto tour. We identify the innovations and put them into an overall context with expert evaluation. There‘s no quicker and more compact way to experience the latest innovations in packaging printing!

Digital printing expert Uli Jeusfeld is also in the field of Strategic Marketing,Sales concepts and sales management active. As a consultant, he founded the consultancy network :Brain Workers in 2006.
His slogan: “Print becomes less, print becomes more valuable – customers want be proactively convinced of the value!“

After graduating from business administration with a focus on marketing and IT organization he first went for 4 years in the sales department of an American manufacturers in the field of document management and digital printing technology and then into the training area, before he became self-employed in 1998
In the following years he worked extensively in sales development for leading technology manufacturer of the graphic arts industry in Europe.
In 2005 he started his career in consulting printing companies and development of business models around digital printing. He experienced and accompanied the early years one to one marketing and variable data printing with lectures and workshops for setting up web shops and the value-added sales of data-based printing applications.
Uli Jeusfeld advises and supports printing companies in the development of USP’s, the conception and marketing of W2P shops and the development of value-oriented sales strategies
In addition to his involvement as a Business Development Consultant for various Digital printing provider and developer of shop and Crossmedia software he was between 2015 and 2019 as Associate Consultant and member of the European Consultant network of Infotrends Inc. active, today known as as Keypoint Intelligence.
One of his favourite topics is the development of Tribrid sales and Acquisition strategies in which he uses the methods of classic sales and social selling with the targeted use of print combined along the customer journey.

Gerhard Märtterer studied marketing and IT at the Stuttgart Media University. He founded AlphaPicture, the world‘s first cloud service for digital printers, in 2003. He has been developing groundbreaking prototypes for highly personalized direct marketing, magazines, catalogs and transpromo with publishers, press manufacturers and software partners since 2005.

From 2013 to 2018, he transformed one of Europe‘s largest web offset printing plants into an integrated hybrid printer. He consults, teaches and journalizes as „The ONE for One-to-One“ in Europe, America and Japan. He is also co-founder and spiritus rector of the PPA  Programmatic Print Alliance.

After studying to become a printing engineer, he began his career as an application engineer in packaging printing. This brought him to the supplier industry a short time later, where he held a variety of positions in the printing plate and ink sector. The spectrum ranged from application technology, product management and marketing to the production of printing inks, and in 2016 Dieter Finna founded pack.consult, a platform for content marketing and consulting in packaging printing. Here he writes technical corporate communications for renowned companies in the industry. His articles on the latest developments in packaging and label printing are published by trade magazines worldwide in their printed editions or online media.digital printing and packaging printing are the main topics in his consulting work.

These range from print tests with the latest machine technology and the design of efficient production processes to the planning of new printing plants in project consortiums with partners.

Anke Frieser-Tausch is technical head of the DFTA Technology Centre (an independent and neutral institution), where she engages with research, development, and training.

She has more than 30 years of industry experience and has been working for the DFTA Technology Center since 2018. Previously she held multiple positions for a supplier in the global flexographic printing industry including technical support, product development and managing projects.