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Greetings from Las Vegas. I've just finished an intensive XMPie Users Group Conference that has been running over the past three days. It's been a brief, but inspiring conference and my head is buzzing with the all the information that I've digested. The conference was tailored for three audiences; designers, marketers and developers, with supporting tracks to cater for each audience. There was a good level of attendance, with approximately 180 delegates from across the globe. While it was impossible to join every session, I managed to attend a good mix and I thought I'd share some key highlights that I took away from the conference.
CMO Council
Donovan Neale-May from the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council opened the conference by sharing findings from their 2008 Marketing Outlook study. This informative study shared the top issues and challenges facing global marketers. The study revealed that focus of marketing organisations in 2008 is to upgrade the efficiency and effectiveness of their marketing operations. Planned adoption of new solutions includes CRM, campaign management and marketing automation. It's surprising to learn that few marketers have adopted these types of high-value solutions—as they provide the potential to enable automated, trigger-based marketing from determined events, such as customer lease renewals, service reminders and much more. This topic was definitely relevant to delegates, as XMPie's highly configurable API, together with their recently announced Marketing Console, provides a perfect platform for XMPie users to monitor, track and automate marketing campaigns and events.
Another surprising fact to learn was that while there is a high-perceived value of customised communications in the US market, usage is still very low despite years of experience. The study also noted that an overwhelming 56 percent of marketers believe personal communications out performs traditional mass market delivery, but they still fail to adopt it.
Boeing
Boeing recently invested in XMPie and are now exploring the possibilities of leveraging the software to drive their marketing operations. Boeing has made a significant investment on maximising customer experience, which included developing a custom-made Customer Experience Centre, equipped with RFID sensors which track visitor locations in the centre to create a relevant experience. Customer intimacy is key to Boeing, and personalisation plays a significant part in creating a highly tailored experience.
Boeing also shared their inspiring vision for digitally customizable marketing materials in the session, which is "to achieve a unprecedented level of 'one to one' in our marketing approach … provide our customer breakthrough material highly customized to their absolution current needs, most pressing problems, aspirations … frame the conversation uniquely to them and convey solutions in a breakthrough way … express our brand though state of the art technology … surprise, excite, inform, and motivate customers, while lowering their costs and greatly simplifying the way we work."
XMPie Direction
The XMPie Management Team shared their focus, new products and themes for 2008. Core themes included integration, VDP, cross-media, web enablement, application enablers and marketing tools. While XMPie intend to continue to push the envelope on feature development, they also will bring back focus to variable-data printing, with an emphasis on quality, speed, scalability, robustness and usability. XMPie also intend to expand their cross-media platform to enable more streamlined, integrated campaign deployment and management.
Web enablement was another strong theme, and XMPie plan to further develop their existing web-to-print solutions. XMPie showcased recent improvements to their document editor tool, uEdit, which now includes several significant enhancements, including support for server-side fonts (rather than client-side), which enables users to choose from a selection of fonts and dynamically edit text through uEdit's powerful flash-based editor. Previously, users had to install fonts locally on the client-side, which significantly restricted the use of this tool. Also under the theme of web enablement was greater integration with third-party solutions to enable tighter integration and opportunities for web publishing.
XMPie's underlying objective across all themes is to "improve customer experience" and the technologies they previewed demonstrated that they're definitely serious about it. XMPie President, Jacob Aizikowitz, closed by explaining his vision that "campaigns should be continuously refined conversations, not personalised lectures", and that XMPie are "focused on enabled immediacy of print to complement cross-media".
XMPie Marketplace
At the conference XMPie announced XMPie Marketplace, a new online service for XMPie customers. Built on their web-to-print uStore platform, Marketplace enables customers to preview and purchase campaign assets and applications. The inital focus of Marketplace is to provide off-the-shelf personalised images, which are packaged together with licenced images and other resources required to achieve the desired effect.
Marketplace includes an image library of both font-based and image-based characters for use in print and web. The images they previewed were very effective and surprisingly affordable. There will be two pricing categories, font-based images are US$99, and images which include character-based images are US$199. XMPie has also included a very useful preview feature, enabling you to enter a name and generate a non-watermarked preview the image, which is very useful for creating samples to show customers.
Customer Beta testing for Marketplace will commence this month and be launched in March. While the intial focus is on personalised images, XMPie will expand this to include other popular campaign assets and applications, such as calendars.
Personalised Video
Yes, personalised video! This one of the most impressive and inspiring technology demonstrations at the conference. XMPie demonstrated how it is possible to personalise videos using uImage and the movie file support in Photoshop CS3. While the current integration is quite loose and can only batch-generate personalised movie files, XMPie's direction of this feature is fairly obvious. I expect to see that XMPie will soon allow placement of variable objects within InDesign documents and Web pages, for dynamic generation of interactive PDF files and on-demand web applications. They stepped through how to create personalised image effects from scratch, and how surprisingly straightforward it is to create realistic effects. There's no complex video editing software to learn—most Photoshop users would find this relatively straightforward to do.
While the samples previewed were quite effective, they weren't over-inspiring, but what was inspiring was imagining the possibilities of how this technology could be used—to generate interactive PDF brochures embedded with a personalised video, or generate web applications for on-demand personalisation like the impressive Dexter campaign. The limitation, however, will be governed by the creative ability of the XMPie user. Video animation requires a unique design skill set and falls outside the realm of most print service providers, however XMPie are also looking into offering personalised video templates on Marketplace in the future. I've shared a couple of samples below, which were personalised using Photoshop and uImage. Click the arrows to start.
Summary
In summary, the XMPie Users Group Conference was both informative and inspiring, enabling delegates to learn, evangelise and share their VDP and XMPie software knowledge. I've come away from the conference feeling refreshed and energised. I've also developed a greater understanding of the opportunities for variable-data publishing and I'm looking to watching XMPie execute their themes and direction during 2008.
Posted on Sunday, 10 February 2008 at 11:27 AM | TrackBack: http://www.veedeepee.com/cgi-bin/mt-tb.cgi/87
Elliot,
You did a fine job of summarizing the conference. The two things that I walked away with are the new features in uStore 3.0, some that are featured in the Marketplace site. The other is the push for tools for more personalized channels. Better support for things like SMS and as you demonstrated, personalized video.
You wondered why even though many feel that personalized communications is better than traditional, but it is still a small market. My answer is the lack of measuring tools and the ability for CMO's to cost justify the new techniques.
I think things like Marketing Console and service provider adept at tesing will make the difference.
Jeff
Posted by Jeffrey Stewart on Sunday, 17 February 2008 at 8:52 AM