The Iferia Techcast
00:11:30 · Gary Pageau
And the industry as a whole, it was a shock to the system Because like I said, you know, people did different things from the analog to digital transition to try and get people to print. But no one knew how much people would print. And that was really the big question was were people not printing because it was difficult? Was people printing because they didn't want the prints? Were people not printing because they were just happy looking at them on a screen? Was there something wrong with printed pictures that the industry didn't know about? And so, you know, that was really a shock to the system. A of businesses either didn't adapt or went out of business, or they found other industries. You know, what happened And, was the business that adapted figured out, okay, you know, we can print on a four by six piece of paper, which was the traditional snapshot, or we can use advanced technology to print on a bunch of different other surfaces. And that's really what's happened with print now. People are still printing a ton. Actually, are spending more on printing now. Those households that are printing more are actually spending more on printing, but they're spending it on, let's say, one print for the wall. Instead of getting an envelope full of snapshots, they're getting one wall print. That envelope full of snapshots was $12 maybe, and maybe you did two or three of those a year. Now people are spending $50.60 bucks on a wall canvas or a wall decor, or they're making mugs or they're making photo books. There's many more products people can make, which really is what the consumer really wanted. That's what they've always wanted was different ways of doing that. But the industry, because it was driven by production, by the idea that we want to preserve this chemical process, we're going to force everyone to just have four by six inch prints. So the ability to print on many more surfaces has really created a tremendous amount of opportunity for everyone, but it's a wholesale change. A lot of the companies didn't adapt well. A lot of companies misread kind of where the customers were going to go, and a lot of new companies have popped up to address those issues. So it's really been, for me as someone who covers the industry, it's very exciting because there's all kinds of new stuff happening to reach a customer.
00:14:09 · Gary Pageau, Ezekiel Iferia
But it's really a wildly different industry than it was. It's still servicing the same market, right? Which is helping people preserve their memories and share images and tell their stories, but they're just doing it in a radically different way than they were fifteen years ago. [00:14:30] S0: Okay. Alright. So, Gary, you know, looking at, you know, the the the way things are today, you know, are there any lessons from that transition, you know, that applies to what's happening today with artificial intelligence? Are we seeing the same patterns? Are there any parallels?
00:14:52 · Gary Pageau
[00:14:52] S1: Well, there's a couple of things that are happening in terms of artificial intelligence. Now, again, the industry has already been through this once in the sense that there was a time when you took a picture, that was it, Right? You saw the picture, and that was the picture. And then in the eighties and nineties, Adobe Photoshop came out. And that was when pictures could be edited as easily as text, basically. So the idea... There was a lot of... People don't remember this. There was a lot of pushback back then. The news organizations were saying things like, oh my gosh, this is terrible because no one will be able to understand what a picture is. No one will believe pictures because they're going to be edited and all this other stuff, which is the same conversation we're having now with AI. And guess what? People adapt it. And, you know, people have been faking pictures and editing pictures and doing all these kind of things for years, and that behavior is not going to change. So what's happening in the world of AI and imaging is it's kind of splitting it off into two areas. There's AI generative AI, which means I write a prompt of some sort and I create an image. Right? It didn't exist previously. And it's, Maybe it's me as a knight on shining armor and I've got a sword. Now that image doesn't exist anywhere, but I can create it using a system. That's entertainment, right? That's not a memory. That's not authentic is the word we'd like to use. So it's not... If there's a place for it, there's absolutely a place for entertainment, but it's generally things that where people don't want hold on to that image. They may share it on social media. They may do wacky TikTok things and things like that, but it's not generally something that's important to people. It's not emotional. There's no emotional resonance. On the other hand, there's been a whole kind of swing back towards real photography, print photography, whatever you want to call it. Gen Z and the kids, air quotes, are very involved in photography. Film, which we all thought was gonna be dead by now, has now come back. Kodak is now making a lot of... They're now back producing film six days a week, eighteen hours a day, and which you know, five years ago, they were ready to shut shut it down. There's no one...
00:17:27 · Gary Pageau
And because what's happened is people have discovered that film photography is a more real expression, authentic experience. It can't be faked. So this whole swing towards authenticity is kind of where my segment of the industry is going, which is like, you know, it's not a real memory, a real story if you're not preserving it in a physical form in some way. And I think that trend's going to continue because people are having a backlash to some of this AI stuff, right? So you've seen in the music industry, there's AI music on Spotify. People don't like that. They may listen to it because it's there, but they're not thrilled with it. Artists have had to make money on tour. Taylor Swift made a ton of money on tour. She also makes a lot of money actually making physical LPs. She's gone back to pressing albums, which a lot of artists are doing. It's like, you're not a legitimate artist now if you aren't physically making long play records that are sold back in record stores. That's coming back. People are now going back and buying DVDs of movies because they don't want to deal with streaming services anymore. And, you know, is it gonna be as big of a market as it was? Absolutely not. Is it going to be, you know... But it's gonna be enough of a market where people are gonna be able to wanna engage in it because I think, you know, as more AI content is generated, people want real authentic alternatives, if that makes sense. So, you know, I think people are looking for opportunities to have, you know, real connection, and photography and printing is certainly one of those things. It could also mean you're in a... You know, you'll go to a concert and support an artist that way through a live performance. It may be instead of seeing a movie where three quarters of it is CGI and AI generated stuff, you may go see a play or a theater performance right, to get that sort of real experience. So I do think there's gonna be a resurgence in that. And again, will it be as big as it ever was back in the day? Probably not, but it's certainly gonna be... It's not gonna disappear completely and entirely.
00:19:53 · Ezekiel Iferia
[00:19:53] S0: So, Gary, you know, you... Let let... Let's talk about the Dead Pixels Society. You you you you you build this, you know, you build this leading niche community, you know, in the imaging space. Right. So what exactly is the Dead Pixels Society? And, you know, why did you focus on such a specific community?
00:20:17 · Gary Pageau
[00:20:17] S1: Well, I focused on it because I knew it. I mean, that was literally what I already... I mean, I knew the market was there because I had spent twenty five years in the industry. So it started as a joke. So the name comes from around 2009, there was a conference that we, as our industry organization, had, or it's sort of like a TED Talks kind of thing. Was like an executive conference. And one of the speakers who was one of our drinking buddies got up there and he was from one of the software companies, and he was talking about how there's images that are on a screen that are live pixels, and then there's pixels that are printed that are dead pixels. And he was trying to talk about how there's a different relationship to the viewer between what's on a screen versus what's printed. But 80% of the people in the audience made their living printing pictures. And so they took it as not as an offense, but they kind of gave them a hard time about it. So as a joke at the next conference, we came up with Dead Pixels Society pins, which were basically, you know, a pixelated skull and all that other stuff. And it was basically... And so it sort of became like a club sort of idea. It's sort of the idea that you only got this lapel pin if you were at this conference, and so we had this sort of little clubby sort of thing. Then when I left the organization in 2012, I kind of took that idea with me and started this Facebook group for my friends in the industry, basically. And then, like I said, one of my buddies after a few years said, You know what? You should turn this into a newsletter. I'll sponsor it. And I said, okay. It's now I like money. I know how to make newsletters. I can... I'll do that. And I really chose the niche because what happened was after the industry association went out of business, the Photo Marketing Association, the the universe kind of broke up. The photo imaging universe kind of broke up in the sense that, there were a lot of different segments in the industry. There was, like, the the the online photo people, and the camera stores, and the retail printers, and the retailers, the matched merchandisers, and all these people were all separate, but our organization was the glue that held them together because we were all kind of in the same business of providing imaging services to consumers.