RIT to Take Over Print-in-the-Mix Website

The Print Council, established in 2002 to promote the broader use of print in the marketing and media mix, is transfering sponsorship of the Print-in-the Mix website to Rochester Institute of Technology. Print-in-the-Mix was created in 2007 with a grant from The Print Council and is a clearinghouse of research on the effectiveness of advertising media including print, mobile and other direct forms of marketing communication.

RIT’s Cross-Media Innovation Center will become the primary sponsor of Print-in-the-Mix. The newly created center at RIT will include research, development and education initiatives across the integrated cross-media value chain. These research initiatives reflect the collaboration between RIT faculty and representatives of industry, resulting in research that is interdisciplinary and highly relevant to the business concerns of the graphic communications industry.

The official sponsorship transfer will occur at the first Cross-Media Innovation Center summit Oct. 18–19 at the Hyatt Regency hotel in Rochester, N.Y. To register for the summit, go to www.rit.edu/cmic.

“We are pleased to work with The Print Council in transferring the stewardship of the Print-in-the-Mix resource to the Cross-Media Innovation Center,” says Chris Bondy, RIT’s School of Media Sciences administrative chair. “Though always housed at RIT, we will also now have fiscal responsibility for the Print-in-the-Mix site. We see it as the centerpiece of RIT’s outreach to the industry to highlight the integration of all types of media that are used in advertising.”

The Print Council will work with the Cross-Media Innovation Center to promote “Print Delivers” programs scheduled for 2012 and will effectively cease separate operations at the end of the year.

“While we will be sad to see this chapter end, the role of the Print Council is not to perpetuate the organization but to promote the value of print communications,” says Benjamin Cooper co-founder and executive director of The Print Council. “When we began, there was no clearinghouse on marketing information such as Print-in-the Mix and no programs that brought the message of the value of print to the media specifier market. We are proud of these accomplishments.”

Current industry sponsors of The Print Council will have their sponsorship transferred to the Cross-Media Innovation Center for 2012 and are invited to participate in the summit. They will also be invited to become industry sponsors of the Cross-Media Innovation Center from 2013 through 2016 and continue to provide guidance on maintaining and expanding the Print-in-the-Mix resource. Levels of sponsorship can be found at vwww.rit.edu/cmic.

The programs in RIT’s School of Media Sciences (formerly the School of Print Media) provide students with the critical thinking skills necessary to architect meaningful ways to deploy communications in a variety of venues. The school provides a “print-plus” approach to learning leveraging its heritage in printing and publishing with the latest data analytics, content management and cross-media deployment methodologies.

Source: RIT.