The annual Power of Print seminar run by Two Sides in the prestigious surroundings of Stationers’ Hall in the shadow of Saint Paul’s Cathedral, London, boasted a stellar list of speakers recently.

While all the speakers had something interesting to say to the assembled audience drawn from the print and communications industry, I want to focus on just a few of them, those who were especially inspiring, starting with Justin Cairns, Head of Offline Production for Ogilvy UK, the world renowned advertising and creative agency. His team produces work that you can touch including direct mail, books, press ads, outdoor, promotional merchandise, and exhibition stands.

Justin’s core message was that as the internet increasingly takes on the heavy lifting when it comes to marketing information, print is freed up to become more creative; the great seducer as it has been memorably called. And it’s OK to be more expensive than online media because, as Rory Sutherland the acclaimed advertising guru and vice president of Ogilvy UK said, “messages that are costly to convey we perceive in a different way”.

And furthermore creatives love print Justin declared – they love new formats, different finishes and working with something physical. Printers, he noted, are the enablers of their creativity and he ran through a series of powerful and eyecatching campaigns with print at their heart, including from Dulux paint, What 3 Words, and from JCDecaux, the outdoor media owner, with its astonishing, successful campaign on the Madrid metro featuring an anonymous grandmother.

Justin’s conclusion was cheerfully upbeat; he said that, like Woody from Toy Story, the favourite toy that is always there, print can still be the hero.

A change of gear followed as Keshini Dodhia from Tony’s Chocolonely stepped up to give us some insights into the ethical values that drive this increasingly successful chocolate manufacturer. It has become a formidable rival to the seven dominant chocolate manufacturers, driven by a mission to trace all bars; support strong farmers; pay farmers a high price; go for the long term; and focus on quality and productivity. Tony’s Chocolonely is committed to bringing down the 1,000,000 plus number of children working in the cocoa production business in the two biggest producing countries of Cote d’Ivoire and Ghana.

At the same time, the company is a big fan of print, using its paper wrappers to send enlightening messages, and offering personalised wrappers for corporate clients and individual consumers alike. And thereby winning new customers, building loyalty, and creating knew advocates for its partnership approach to ending exploitation in cocoa.

James Pryor co-founder and managing partner of Touch, a structural packaging and product innovation agency, gave an insightful presentation into the direction of travel for packaging.

A combination of retailers (who will delist brands and products that do not match their own sustainability goals), consumers (who expect brands and governments to take responsibility for addressing sustainability issues) and legislation, are causing brands to make great strides in the sustainability and recyclability of their brands’ packaging. Europe is leading the way with the most progressive initiatives, but other regions are following.

James foresees by 2030 Europe creating less waste and using resources more responsibly to ensure a functioning circular economy for packaging. Looking further ahead to 2050 he expects three future directions for packaging. Recycling will be moving to regenerating as the need for non renewable materials declines. Packaging in a thriving circular economy will be a tool with which to renew and regenerate, lowering climate impact and cleaning the environment. PET bottles made from carbon emissions are a great foretaste of this as they are already here.

Secondly, packaging moving from enabling to enhancing. It will no longer  just contain and protect a product. Rather it will play a key role in the way we interact with it, such as connected vitamin bottles which remind the user to take the next dose and link to an app for automatic reordering. Again this is already here, a glimpse of the future.

Lastly, from individual to collaborative, as reusable packaging becomes a shared asset that multiple brands can use. For example, there is a British nationwide refill scheme that enables customers to bring any empty 70cl bottle to be refilled from a bulk dispensary. James left us with a positive impression of how the packaging industry is set to play a bigger role in safeguarding our planet’s resources.

The stage was therefore perfectly set for Jonathan Porritt CBE, the eminent writer and campaigner on sustainable development. And while the latest evidence on the impact of climate change was sobering, he offered some hope of where respite may come from.

But first Jonathan rightly foreshadowed the recent announcement from COP 29 that 2024 would be the hottest year ever and he highlighted the iron clad laws of physics that are the cause of the manifest impacts we are now seeing: floods, droughts, wildfires, and storms.

The cost of these natural disasters is huge and growing. They threaten the financial stability of one of the foundation stones of a stable world financial and economic environment, namely the insurance industry. The losses it is incurring in Florida and elsewhere in America for example are unsustainable. But this industry is too important to go bust.  Jonathan is hoping for a dawning realisation among policy makers that by tackling climate change more vigorously, the vital insurance industry can be safeguarded and economic chaos prevented. So while the headline statistics may suggest we are entering a “doom loop,” Jonathan is sanguine about a belated concerted response to the issue of climate change.

So a series of provocative and illuminating presentations, in a stunning setting, that highlighted the rich potential for reinvigoration and reinvention that print enjoys against of course the backdrop of the immense looming challenges posed by a changing climate.

Two Sides is a global campaign promoting the attractive and sustainability of print, paper and paper packaging. All presentations and speaker recordings can be found at www.twosides.info/power-of-print-2024