This paper reports on a special pilot coating and industrial printing trial designed to gain fundamental knowledge on ink adhesion failure on coated papers. We found that ink adhesion failure resulted in white spots without ink on the paper, referred to as uncovered areas and these spots gave print mottle problems. The white spots were due to two fundamentally different types of ink adhesion failure. One is the well-known ink rejection, which simply means that ink is not transferred to the surface. The other is a new type of ink adhesion failure, confirming a previous hypothesis suggested from laboratory observations. We refer to this as ink-lift-off adhesion failure, meaning that ink initially deposited on the paper surface becomes lifted off from the surface in a subsequent print unit. Adhesion failure by this mechanism was seen to occur more frequently than failure due to the well-known ink rejection.