When computer to plate first found its way into production environments, many prepress companies invested in the strategy of making the printing plates and then delivering them to printing companies. The plates were physically driven to the customer. As these companies wondered how to deal with two-in-the-morning breakdowns of 24/7 presses, a family-owned prepress business in Winnipeg, called Embassy Graphics, was taking an entirely different approach to the new world of digital workflow.

They actually encouraged their printing clients to install CTP technology, while Embassy instead focused on transmitting crisp digital files. As the industry confirmed its shift from film, hundreds of prepress firms found themselves in jeopardy. Most of the ones that did not go out of business were bought by, or became, printers. As a result, a lot of frontend expertise has slipped out of the industry.

This, however, is not an entirely dire situation because as the frontend continues to advance - with the likes of PDFx - the software used to drive it is slowly becoming a commodity. This may change many of the ideas that printers have formed around the value-added promise, a strategy for the new economy that few companies seem able to actually derive significant revenues from.

"And here's where a lot of people in the industry in the past have been thinking," says Bryan Payne Jr., president and CEO of Embassy. "Well, sell value-added... that is a bullshit term. Give them some magic pixie dust, then they are in a haze, they are in the ether, like they don't know you are getting a premium. That is crap."