J. Joel Quadracci
Analyst · Singular Research.
I think -- again, I think Dave kind of pointed to some of it when we talked about some of -- if I start with pricing, we have been guiding to 1% to 2% declines in pricing per year, and we've experienced that. But again, I know you're new to the story. One of the things that happened in '13 is we had twice the amount of contracts come due than is our normal runoff. And so those were mark-to-market hitting 2014 here, so that's been a little bit of headwind for us because you can't always pull the cost out at the same pace that that's kicking in. But if you took that out, our pricing decline was less than 1%. So at the lower or low end of what we had been talking about. So I think that's reason for some positive feelings. When you think about volumes. Volumes, they're going to be a little bit all over the place in terms of where people are, but we've guided to 1% to 3% volume declines, which is a rather manageable number because, again, that's about matching capacity with demand. It's the pricing side that -- where you really have to have the best platform, and that's why we've focused so much on making sure that the most efficient plants are really fully utilized, while also, as we close these outdated plants, making sure we melt that equipment down because while it's still mechanically viable, it's not economically viable either for us or for our clients, quite frankly. And so we continue to see that marketing, in general, is -- people are realizing that it's a mix of everything. For a while, we spent most of our time trying to explain why print isn't dead, and I think the world is starting to realize that, and it's really about the combination of all of it. So we've seen continued interest and focus on how do retailers do more direct mail, how do they do more aggressive things with in-store signage. Magazines, again, I think, are here to stay. I think you'll see continued consolidation. But as people like Time Inc. -- I think one of the benefits of Time Inc. being spun out is now they can kind of be in control of their destiny and, hopefully, reinvest in content because I think some of it -- some of what's happened in some part of the industry when things are tough, it's easy to deinvest in the quality of what you have. And while their properties are very high quality, I think, in general, the industry is reinvesting in it, but also getting more savvy about multichannel. And so again, I think the big challenge is long-run print. You're still -- we still plan for that, call it, the 1% to 3% decline. But I think there's a lot of good things going on to kind of say that we're starting to see some stability.