The British government announced Change4Life, England’s first and the world’s most ambitious social marketing campaign aimed at reducing rising levels of childhood obesity.

Lateral Group used XMPie® and the Xerox® iGen3® 110 Digital Production Press paired with a CX Print Server powered by Creo® to achieve the objectives of Change4Life -  to motivate families at risk of obesity by encouraging them to respond and engage in long-term behaviour changes.

To help them with this important program,  Lateral Group created a compelling “How Are The Kids” package, printed on recyclable stock certified by the Forest Stewardship Council, which included a Handbook for Healthy, Happy Kids, a personalized action plan, and a Change4Life calendar with activity stickers for families to easily track their day-to-day progress.    The personalized packages were produced as a result of responses to quesionnaires that were submitted.

You can read more about this Xerox Best-of-the-Best contest winner at http://www.xmpie.com/change4life

Originally posted on XMPie’s Official Blog

Initially focusing on the public sector, and in particular the education market, where the response to student enquiries to Colleges and Universities offers an ideal application, Customation has assembled an experienced team with expertise in marketing communication, creative design, content layout, personalisation, web design and development, and print management.

Initially focusing on the public sector, and in particular the education market, where the response to student enquiries to Colleges and Universities offers an ideal application, Customation has assembled an experienced team with expertise in marketing communication, creative design, content layout, personalisation, web design and development, and print management.

Customation uses XMPie to create the customised content.

All organisations continuously search for improvement in the effectiveness of their marketing communications and the Customation approach offers significant benefits over the traditional bulk printing of generic collateral with the associated storage costs and wastage. Building a positive relationship with your prospects and customers while simultaneously reducing your carbon footprint must be an attractive proposition to everyone.

Birmingham’s weather has been surprisingly nice for IPEX. Unfortunately, we haven’t had any free time to enjoy it! The XMPie exhibit has been filled wall-to-wall with people since the show started on Tuesday and our resident experts have been tied-up giving back-to-back demonstrations. Attendees have even been stopping in their tracks in the corridors to listen to presentations, which has caused quite the traffic jam.

The XMPie Advantage playground has proven very popular with attendees interested in getting some hands-on experience with personalization. The roaming uPrint Mobile demonstration showing how to create personalized greeting cards using an iPhone and a local printer is also creating a buzz around the show.

With IPEX half over, we are looking forward to four more busy days. So, if you haven’t been by to see our exhibit, stop by Hall 7 to see us!

Originally posted on XMPie’s Official Blog

Word around On Demand is that attendance is light, but you wouldn’t know that based on the traffic in the XMPie booth. From the minute the doors opened on Tuesday, the demonstration stations have been packed.

The XMPie Advantage Theatre presentations have also been very well attended. In fact, XMPie customer Brian DeWitt of Prism presented yesterday to a full house of attendees all interested in hearing how Prism is using XMPie software for a very unique sales application.

If Tuesday is an indication, we are poised for a hectic and successful On Demand!

Originally posted on XMPie’s Official Blog

Some have spoken about the fact that actually delivering a cross media campaign is the hardest element; whilst others have struggled in actually selling it to to their customers. The vast majority of commercial printers that now have the capability to deliver these types of highly relevant and interactive cross media campaigns; seem to struggle with actually selling the concept into their customers. Some are happy to continually take large quantities of print volume with the relatively small profit margins that they deliver – whilst ignoring the vast amount of additional opportunity that exists in these accounts. Other commercial printers seem to struggle to engage the right people, bring them to the table and move the conversation from ‘product’ to ‘value’. In today’s marketplace it is all about selling the value, linking all the elements together. In comparison talking to some marketing agencies they struggle with actually delivering the concept in a timely and ‘joined up’ fashion.

So here’s my top 5 observations:

• You need to engage the right people - cross media campaigns do not sit with the print-buyer. Engaging at a senior marketing or brand level is critical. It’s a high level sell, that potentially involves multiple budgets and multiple people. You need to identify these people and get them all around a table and get the buy-in to move forward.
• You need to sell value, not product – a cross media campaign should not be a product sell in the same way print can be. Integrated cross media campaigns tend to be non-linear campaigns that involve different forms of communication, at different times sent on-demand or autonomously. They are not one-time pieces, but a conversation that develops around a contact or a customer. Not understanding this and talking about £/per thousand for print, emails, RURLs is not the answer and a dangerous strategy. The answer is in the value of the campaign itself, not in the individual elements that make it up.
• Understand the value of analysis – today’s cross media tools, such as XMPie contain very powerful tools for tracking and analysing a campaign in real-time. It’s surprising how many people do not understand the value of this single element! The ability to track in real-time, all communication and interaction is huge. Add in the ability that you can give the end-customer access to this information in real-time is even larger! What would be the additional value in being able to provide real-time and interactive analytic information back to a customer? £1,000, £5,000 or even £10,000 on top of a campaign set-up costs? That’s pure profit for a huge value-added ability.
• Get the right people internally – putting together a project team internally to actually deliver these campaigns is again critical, and I have seen customers fall onto their knees because they have not done this. As a service provider you need to make sure that you have both the technical skills to deliver the project as well as the managerial  skills to ensure that the project is delivered on time, within budget and successfully. There is also a huge need to have the the right creative skills. I cannot stress enough that the best cross media campaigns that I have seen delivered were because of the both the creative ideas and the creative implementation. It’s not all about the raw data. It’s absolutely about the right ideas, the right implementation and the right delivery.
• You need to communicate at every stage – in the same way that a successful cross media campaign engages and works because of the conversation, it’s imperative that everyone involved in a campaign needs to communicate and converse themselves. Allowing everyone to take part in the design and implementation of a campaign is critical – from developers to designers to the marketing teams. By not allowing this to happen you run the risk of missing something, or at worst delivering something that just does not work. If you work with external agencies or designers, then allow them to come in and work hand-in-hand with the rest of the team. I still find it amazing how many designers are not aware of simply what can be done now-a-days.

Quite simply, the rules of engagement have changed. Many marketeers are still stuck in the perception that online marketing is better than offline marketing, that it is all about mass email marketing and social media. Many commercial printers are stuck in trying to engage the wrong people about cross media campaigns, selling on product not value. By having the right tools, the right people and the right processes a huge amount of value can be delivered in a very short period of time. Highly targeted, cross media campaigns with email, print, RURLs and SMS can be designed, implemented and delivered in extraordinarily fast times (4 days in some cases) delivering huge value and potentially huge profits.

For the commercial service providers ask yourself the following questions: “Do I have the right people, technology and process to deliver this?” and “Are my sales people engaging the right customers, and are they asking the right questions?”

For the agencies and client focused individuals ask yourself, “From my top 5 customers/prospects, do I understand their objectives well enough, and can I engage them with 3 achievable ideas that will deliver them additional value, with 1 very strong value statement?”

If the answer to any of these questions is “no” then you are behind others in your field, and missing out on potential opportunity and profit.

In my mind, it is not a question of the technology any more. If you can think of the concept then the chances are that it can be delivered. The only thing stopping you is coming up with the ideas, selling the value of them to your customers and making it happen.

Thanks to several people for their input to this; @pvantees , @ScottDubois, @tseha, @jeantinb, @FernandoSteler.

Do you agree? Have you overcome some of these issues? I am always interested in your comments.

CMO’s are quickly realizing that there is no longer a place for the simplistic, one-way conversations that marketing practitioners have depended upon so heavily in past. We all know there is a sophisticated sector of digital baby boomers that will soon become the major consumers of tomorrow. We will have no choice, but to participate in this playground of interactive digital content, if we want to survive.

With this fundamental shift in consumer behavior, the need for one-to-one personalization in traditional marketing communications is more acute than ever. The clever integration of technology, creative content and personal interaction is that powerful combination that will allow us to redefine the way we communicate.

We all agree that the conversations need to be customer-centric and authentic. But therein lies the dilemma. As much as we would like, in most circumstances it is simply not logistically possible for companies to reach out to each individual customer, one-on-one.  And this is where technology can help.  The idea of ‘one-to-one’ is really ‘one-to-many,’  where each one thinks that they are the only one.

So the real question is – how do we efficiently manage individual conversations and interactions, along both axes of time and media? It’s not simple and many companies are wrestling with this “cross media” challenge.

One significant clue is that we see time and again, that an integrated solution for one-to-one publishing is critical to achieve a successful cross-media strategy.  The holy grail of cross-media publishing is the ability to communicate with consumers across the spectrum of print and digital media channels with consistent messages that are relevant to the individual recipient in terms of content, presentation, timeliness, and channel.

Only an integrated system could provide the overall event-tracking , analysis and feedback loop capabilities needed to set the stage for an improved dialogue  with targeted messages. In today’s customer-centric environment, no marketer should settle for anything less.

Original posted on XMPie’s Official Blog

From directly inside InDesign CS3 and CS4 XMPie’s uDirect plugin has the ability of generating and placing a barcode within the design. I blogged about this a while ago. However this is limited to using those barcodes within the printed piece. I was thinking about how you could use them online, or in an email communication, or even creating them on-mass to use in another process.

Most people seem to be content in creating single QRCodes that are then used. But what about if you want a QRCode to contain a personalised URL, or a unique piece of information linked to that the recipient?

Well, here’s one idea to create barcodes on mass by using XMPie:

• Fire up InDesign with the XMPie plugin activated. (you can always get the 30-day free trial from www.xmpie.com)
• Create a new document of say 50mm by 50mm
• Connect to your database of recipients, or simple create a Counter and use that
• Create a new image ‘Content Object’, call it QRCode, and set the expression to use the fields of your choosing.
• Place the QRCode content object on the page and change the Dynamic Graphic Properties to ‘Fill proportionally and Centered’
• Save the document
• Select ‘Dynamic Print’ in the XMPie Palette and choose, JPG (or PDF) as the output format.
• Select your output destination and records, and hit ‘OK’
• Job done. You should have individual JPG/PDF files in the output destination folder named {filename}_r{record number}_p001.jpg

The only real drawback here is that the files are not named in a fashion that relates to their contents. It would be great if you could produce them based on an element in the database, like you can with personalised images through uImage. Having said that, you can still work productive in this manner, it just needs more careful thought.

Another reason to use XMPie I think!

uEdit is completely integrated into uStore, XMPie’s solution for rapid deployment of branded, e-commerce enabled,online stores without involving programmers. uEdit extends uStore’s document ordering and customization features by allowing real-time, remote template design editing.

What is also great about uEdit is that is can be used as a standalone tool within a custom developed application. Combined with XMPie’s API and programming tools it becomes easy to create, edit and compose custom-made personalised documents.

This screencast introduces you to a fictional real-estate example. In this example you are able to select a template, upload and manage images that the user wishes to use. Then edit the template by editing the text, images and styles. Once the template is complete yu can upload the recipient data and produce the final PDF for downloading.

For more information take a look at XMPie’s website (www.xmpie.com). Thanks to Tim Perrett for recording the screencast.