Local and Global  

Advertising was never like this 

While he collaborates with another artist—who is both a musician and an etcher—to start up a local marketplace for hand-printed etchings he is thinking of another artist in Rio de Janeiro who is working toward the same goal of using printmaking in public.

News from Brazil

Our friend Cecilia, in Rio de Janeiro, wrote:

Greetings from Rio, Mr. Ritchie

I've been thinking of evening, sadly, here in Brazil people prefer paintings of great size and colored than a small engravers in black. So I think bringing in the engraving, not as a frame to hang on the wall, but with the preciousness of collectionism, the elaborate work in a detailed manner, why guess I'll have to market it.

At the end of July will happen here, the "FLIP," a literary international fair in the historic city of Paraty.

I want to go, but still do not know how to diffuse the engraving through the "Ex Libris", where I believe there may be market, because Brazilians like collections and they will appreciate their collections characterized by a sequence of engravings designed especially for this purpose.

It might sound crazy, but "Ex Libris" is valued in the countries of Eastern Europe, but may have a more current new expression. I'm sending a link on Ex-Libris and photos of the work of a printmaker, who is Russian. He lives in Montreal, is fantastic.

I do not know him, but is that kind of engraver that I like to do, maybe a little more realistic with my personality.

Will I ever only get it when I retire? I've arrive late getting home and no motivation!

But even with this news about the cancellation of the Conference, I booked the holiday (03 to March 10 - Carnival in Brazil now) to try to get good proofs with mini Halfwood and I'll be on my vacation in May in Paraty to inquire about "FLIP " that to take place in in late July and I will investigate the possibility of drafting "Ex Libris" to special books.

Best Regards, Cecília

On a day I was supposed to help a printmaker make his Saturday debut at the bustling Pike Place Market, a plethora of ideas befell me. I was too late for role call, so I spent the day catching up on press making, but the emails taught me a lesson about restoring the connection between the artisan printmaker and the people—call them audience or collectors—in these times of digital communication. Thus, “participatory printmaking” means print on demand, busker style.

Rachel Bartlett, again:

“7. Don't forget about new advertising opportunities”

Of course a magazine is not just about the editorial content, and the publishers also had to think about ways of bringing advertising into the magazine, or even into the crowd sourcing process itself.

At Olivia, for example, advertisers could set their own 'challenges' on the online platform, the results of which then became advertorials in the magazine.

And while it did not come to fruition at the time, the experience of crowd sourcing an edition of Femina did highlight new ways the magazine could run advertising in future versions, Rai said, with the possibility of getting relevant advertisers to sponsor the entire magazine. In April, "one of the leading mobile service providers" was interested in this prospect, he said.

"They said that this year their budget is already taken care of, but next time you do something like this, call on us and we will sponsor the entire activity. So the advertising opportunities are huge."

Advertorials

Outside the industry, people are aware only sometimes they are looking at an advertorial. You see it in paper magazines when full pages are devoted to a product and, when the magazine is being honest, the word “advertisement” appears somewhere above or below the text and pictures. Advertorials is a blend of advertisement and editorial.

As a former art professor, we combined advertisement and promotion with a kind of editorial in the same way the magazine uses advertorials for their pages. For example, promoting printmaking as a fine art form was a new idea in the 1930s in the USA and eventually printmaking made its way into the college curriculum. By the 1960s—when I started college—it was solidly established and that’s where I got my start.

In the past fifty years, things changed a lot and, today, the definition of printmaking as a fine art form like painting hangs on, and I am still promoting and advertising the idea that a technique intended for mass communication can also be a way for artists to explore and express new concepts as well as repeat art historical, two-dimensional visual art.

Magazines were part of the process, and they still sell in the hundreds and thousands of issues—carrying advertisements and advertorials to the masses. The internet may change art magazines and in the same way that online magazines are changing the way the masses experience them, i.e., on desktops, mobiles and tablets linked to the web.

My PrintmakingWorld Ozine

My forecast is that the web and the portability and ubiquity of devices people use for their information—including online magazines—will turn the formula upside down, so that within niche activities like printmaking, the readers will advertise. This is the blog analogy, and readers will convene under an online magazine and make it their own—take it over, in a sense, in the same way that students can “take over” a classroom and put it to use to their learning advantage.