About us
Press
Real IR: Print to pixels
08/01/2004
Jul/Aug 2004
by David Bowen
Too often, online annual reports are a poor relation to their printed counterparts. But new technologies allow firms to make top-notch digital reports quickly and cheaply.
When IR people first discovered the web, around 1996, they quickly spotted the potential benefits of putting annual reports online: make them more available, and save on hard copy mailing costs. Win-win: marvellous. Their web designers set about it, taking the QuarkXPress file that created the paper report and turning it into an Adobe Acrobat (pdf) file that could be downloaded and printed off. A year or so later the more adventurous companies started creating web versions of their reports by cutting and pasting the Quark document into a web page.
Oh, how things have changed! I recently asked the webmaster of a corporate giant how he went about it and he said, "oh we take the Quark document, make a pdf and also cut and paste it..."
There was a phase, circa 2001, of using Flash to provide pointless animation, but the only real innovation has been a hybrid between pdf and HTML. Look, for example, at the 2003 online report and accounts at www.cadburyschweppes.com. It looks like a web site, but is, in fact, a series of photographs of the report, with a simple navigational tool attached. It has one advantage of the web over a pdf, in that it does not have to be downloaded. But it lacks another: searchability. And that, for a working document, is an issue.
The original belief that it was easy to use the internet to provide high service at low cost has so far proved illusory. Yes, it is cheap to create a pdf version of the annual report, but no, this is not a high-quality service. It is only really any use if it is downloaded and printed out. And web versions, while highly usable, are far from cheap. According to Justin Walters, chief executive of online IR specialist Investis, competition did force the price down, but it is now going back up as companies have accepted that lower price means lower quality. And the number of hard-copy mailings that have to be displaced to justify an annual spend of, say, £20,000 on a web version is significant.
The hybrid is an attempt to get round this, providing a better service at a lower cost - but it has weaknesses which, Walters believes, will be exposed by the great hidden driver in web developments: accessibility legislation. The requirement to provide web pages that can be interpreted by screen readers means that photographs of text are out. Investis is looking at ways to ease the problem, but now is surely the time for IR professionals to look at a technology that really can deliver both cost and quality benefits.
XML, or eXtensible Markup Language, allows a document to be produced in a "neutral" form, with instructions saying what should happen to each piece of copy. So rather than saying that a piece of text is of a particular size and style, a tag says that it is, for example, a section heading. When it is then loaded into Quark, an instruction will say that a section heading looks like this, while the HTML editor will say it looks like this.
This system should bring costs crashing down, because there is no need for manual reformatting. London-based Easypress has a product called Atomik Roundtrip, which uses XML to allow Quark XPress and other formats to work in parallel. Update the Quark version and the web version automatically changes - and vice-versa. Easypress says there is a strong interest in using it for annual reports, though the first button has yet to be pressed. The emergence of XML-based content management systems, from companies such as Tridion, are also helping to automate the production of multi-format documents. The words go into a neutral database and can then be formatted in many different ways. By working with a product such as Atomik, these can include Quark as well as the world wide web.
But systems such as these can work only if IR teams rethink the way they produce reports. Now, the print version is produced first - usually by an external agency - and the web version is derived from it, perhaps by a different agency. That will have to change - it will surely make sense to produce the "neutral" version in-house. Will it happen? My webmaster chum says it must, eventually, while Walters at Investis believes the driver will once again be accessibility. XML allows tables to be generated in a form that both looks good and can be read by screen readers. "Accessibility is a great friend of XML," he says. The fact that it should also produce a better service for long-suffering shareholders and analysts is a bonus IR teams should relish.
© Real IR 2004. This article originally appeared in Real
IR, Europe's investor relations magazine. For more information,
visit www.realir.net (this link opens in a new
window).
T. +44 (0)20 7038 9023
F. +44 (0)20 7038 9001
E. enquiries@investis.com
Recruitment:
T. +44 (0)20 7038 9000
E. recruitment@investis.com
For all our contact details visit Contact us.
