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Not Another Calendar!
It's that time of year again. Over the past few weeks, various 2008 calendars have been landing on my desk. Personalised image calendars are a strong trend this year and while I'm an advocate of personalising calendars, I'm not so sure about personalised images. By the time you get through to December and you've seen your name appear written in sand, clouds, food, and other scenes, the personalisation starts to loose its effectiveness and becomes somewhat annoying.
Among the many personalised calendars I've received this year is one from XMPie. This flip-book format calendar arrived in a CD jewel case, and while the calendar design is very "busy" and somewhat underwhelming, they've put a lot of effort into creating a supporting personalised website. Check mine out at calendar.xmpie.com/EliotHarper.
In addition to a How To Guide, the website includes 'production notes' explaining how the artwork and personalisation was created for each months design. The notes detail what software was used, design techniques and even includes QLingo code snippets of how they created the business rules. Nice idea.
While the printed calendar may not have won a medal for creativity, their website definitely deserves some kudos. Other vendors should take a leaf from XMPie's book and focus on educating customers in how to leverage their VDP software investment to create effective personalisation, and in turn, increase the value and effectiveness of VDP to the market.
Posted on Tuesday, 22 January 2008 at 5:01 PM | TrackBack: http://www.veedeepee.com/cgi-bin/mt-tb.cgi/81