This page contains an archive of all entries with the category cross-media. Oldest entries appear first.
Be a Superhero
While the benefits of cross-media VDP are fairly well known, there are limited 'public' examples of VDP cross-media campaigns. Fuji Xerox Australia recently created a campaign to showcase the capablities of cross-media in VDP. Although it's not a 'real' direct marketing campaign, it's a viral acquisition campaign that illustrates the power that cross-media brings to variable-data publishing.
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Posted on Tuesday, 2 October 2007 at 9:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)
Get a Degree
Today there's increasing worldwide competition in the further education market as many new colleges and universities are popping up around the world and the lucrative international student market is slipping away.
One opportunity to leverage VDP in further education marketing is by making prospectuses more relevant. A university or college prospectus typically contains a lot of generic content covering all different faculties, courses, sports and activities — the majority of which is largely irrelevant to any single prospective student.
One good example of how you can relevance to prospectuses comes from Anglia Ruskin University in the UK, where prospective students can request their own personalised undergraduate prospectus and receive a personalised e-mail, webpage and prospectus (online and/or print).
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Posted on Friday, 19 October 2007 at 1:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Revolution in Progress
Unica recently commissioned a whitepaper titled 'Revolution in Progress: How Marketing is Helping Companies Manage a Cross-Channel World', authored by Peppers & Rogers. Although the paper does not specifically focus on variable-data, it discusses how Web 2.0 is changing the way companies interact with their customers and provides interesting facts and figures related to Web 2.0 use and social media advertising spend.
If you're looking at how to engage today's social consumer across different media channels, whether you're using personalisation or not, this paper is definitely worth a read. You can download it from Unica's website (after completing a brief registration form).
Posted on Wednesday, 5 December 2007 at 10:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Magical PURLs
The term 'PURL' has definitely gained attention over recent years, establishing itself alongside industry acronyms including CTP, JDF, VDP and others. Today, it seems that everyone is talking about PURLs — from print providers through to vendors. Despite all this talk about PURLs, not many people really understand what the heck a 'PURL' actually is.
Outside the realm of direct marketing, 'PURL' is an acronym for Persistent Uniform Resource Locator; a URL redirection technique where an intermediate resolution service serves client requests for a defined URL and associates the request with the 'actual' URL on the web server, returning it to the client.
The use of the term 'PURL' within direct marketing refers to 'personalised URLs'. the acronym 'PURL' was first coined (and trademarked) by marketing solution provider Nimblefish. While the term 'PURL' may have been snatched, it hasn't stopped other vendors and providers from adopting variations of the term. Pageflex, MindFire and Indros Group use the term 'Personalised URLs', while XMPie coined the mouthful 'Response URLs'. Despite these various naming conventions, there's little ambiguity in what we're referring to.
While the concept of a personalised URL maybe clear, there's definitely an industry misconception about how they actually work. Many believe that creating PURLs is not for the faint hearted — you either need to fork out mega-bucks for an all dancing cross-media software package or hand your campaign and dollars over to a 'PURL' ASP provider, who have the magical know-how to whip together some personalised web pages for your next marketing campaign. The reality is that creating personalised URLs is far from magic, it's actually surprisingly easy. In fact, you probably have some or all of the tools to create your own personalised landing pages right now, and you don't even know it.
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Posted on Thursday, 10 January 2008 at 1:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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.
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Posted on Tuesday, 22 January 2008 at 5:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Mobile Barcodes
I received an invitation to a party a few months ago, but it didn't arrive in the mail, it was sent to my mobile phone as an text message along with a barcode. The barcode served as my pass to the party, which could be scanned at the event.
Sending barcodes to mobile phones is becoming increasingly popular, particularly in the UK. It's an ideal medium for different ticketing applications and can stop illegal ticket touting and fraud. As a result, mobile barcode ticketing is gaining increasing use for concerts and events. Also, UK coach operators are adopting this technology to issue e-tickets, as passengers can receive their ticket immediately without having to wait for their printed ticket to turn up in the mail and drivers can scan the barcodes when the passengers board the coach. In the US, the ATA has reached an agreement to standardise mobile barcodes for use as airline boarding passes.
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Posted on Monday, 28 January 2008 at 3:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
XMPie Users Group
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.
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Posted on Sunday, 10 February 2008 at 11:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Listen to This!
We've just finished exhibiting at ad:tech, an interactive marketing conference held in Sydney (and other cities worldwide). We went along to demonstrate to delegates how XMPie can be leveraged as an interactive content publishing platform, shifting it far outside the boundaries of cross-channel direct marketing.
We created a demo application of a fictional music online store, named 'earfull', where users can check out new releases for their favourite genre, shop for music and gifts, and essentially have a complete 'Amazon-style' tailored shopping experience—completely driven by XMPie's Interactive Content Port (ICP) technology.
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Posted on Friday, 14 March 2008 at 6:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)
LookWho'sClicking
I had a chance to catch up with Erik Charles from MindFireInc this week. For those who aren't familar with MindFireInc, they specialise in offering a personalised URL service for direct marketing. There appears to be some misconception across the industry regarding MindFireInc's business model—their Web site doesn't give too much away. MindFireInc provide an ASP model, commonly referred today as Software as a Service, or 'SaaS'. Their product, LookWho'sClicking, or LWC, enables users to create and deploy personalised micro sites through a wizard-based interface and track responses. I thought I'd share what I learnt from my call with Erik and explain what their product actually does.
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Posted on Thursday, 24 April 2008 at 3:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
I finally gave in last week and signed up on Twitter. For those of you who aren't familiar with this emerging community, it's a free micro-blogging service that gives users up to 140 characters per post to answer one simple question: "What are you doing?"
Twitter posts, or "updates" are displayed on the user's profile page (here's mine) and delivered to other users who have chosen to "follow" them. Users can send and receive updates by SMS, instant messenger, third-party services (i.e. Facebook), or direct from the Twitter Web site. To learn more about Twitter and how it works, you really should check out the helpful video featured at the bottom of this entry. While you may ask "but who would want to use twitter"? it's actually interesting and useful to hear what others are up to. What's more, I believe Twitter could be set to transform VDP as we know it.
Posted on Wednesday, 18 June 2008 at 8:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)
Magicomm Video
We're starting to see video personalisation popping up regularly in direct marketing campaigns. There are now several good examples of effective video personalisation campaigns, including supporterscheerup, Dexter, Bar da Boa and Ave a Word, to name just a few. These are all online viral campaigns which use a FGF (friend-get-friend) model, where a visitor provides information about a friend, which in turn triggers an email notification to the friend calling them to the Web site where they can view their personalised video.
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Posted on Friday, 11 July 2008 at 7:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Personalised Support
Creating a personalised experience for customers doesn't start and end with direct marketing. As a new white paper from the Service and Support Professionals Association (SPSSA) explains, personalisation can be equally effective in customer service. By tailoring support interactions to fit the specific circumstances of a customer can not only increase customer satisfaction, but can also result in increased revenue, by giving special attention to accounts at certain sales milestones.
This is an interesting concept that I'm sure few organisations actually consider. Why not also make your sales data available to the customer support team? If a customer calls for support and the technician had all relevant sales data easily accessible for pending deals, renewal dates, etc, then they could prioritise their level of support for that customer, ask the right questions and even make relevant sales offers.
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Posted on Friday, 25 July 2008 at 6:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
CRM Data and DM
We're trapped in a paradigm. Many CRM systems offer APIs to enable add-on services, including SalesForce.com with their AppExchange or SugarCRM, a popular open-source CRM solution. And there are many systems integrators and service providers who are already offering integration into these CRM systems using data directly from these CRM systems—but no one appears to be doing this for non-transactional direct marketing campaigns.
There's an irony here. This isn't really a technical limitation—many vendors such as XMPie, Pageflex and others are busy touting support for enterprise-grade database systems including MS SQL, MySQL, Oracle, IBM DB2 and others, but no one is integrating direct marketing campaigns directly into their CRM systems, outside of transactional mail (i.e. bills and statements).
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Posted on Friday, 26 September 2008 at 4:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)
E-mail Metrics
EmailLabs has pubished some helpful statistics and metrics on e-mail usage. This research includes a wealth of useful data, including the most popular day of the week to send e-mail messages (Tuesday), send times (9 am PST), along with open times and more. It's interesting that Wednesday is "opening day" and results from nearly 48.7% of messages being sent on Tuesday and Wednesday.
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Posted on Tuesday, 4 November 2008 at 8:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
QR Hype
There's been plenty of interest and a certain level of hype surrounding QR codes recently. While the technology and concept of mobile tagging is far from new (its been mainstream in Japan for several years with over 42% of mobile users using QR Codes), its adoption rate has been at a much slower pace across the rest of the globe.
Posted on Friday, 6 February 2009 at 4:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)
Experiencing Cross-Media
While many print service providers realise the value of cross-media marketing and some already offer cross-media services at varying levels, these providers often struggle with communicating what cross-media actually is and what it can mean for their customers. Print providers are not alone, you just need to review the numerous websites of cross-media software vendors, from MindFire, Bitstream and others, and you will find it's quite challenging to understand what cross-media is really about and what it can offer.
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Posted on Tuesday, 14 April 2009 at 5:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
PURL Primer
pdfPictures feature an interactive edition of the Seybold Report which you can download from their website. This free report includes a feature article by Heidi Tolliver-Nigro titled "Is it Time to Invest in PURLs?"
If you're researching PURL solutions or want to learn more about what exactly PURLs are, then I'd recommend you read this article. It's a good introductory primer that cuts through the hype (pushed by many vendors) and highlights the pitfalls in using PURLs.
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Posted on Wednesday, 22 July 2009 at 12:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)