This page contains an archive of all entries with the category image personalisation. Oldest entries appear first.
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)
Seasons Greetings
Over the past few days I've been working on a Seasons Greetings card to send to our customers and business partners. This year, we decided to drop our traditional printed cards and try an alternative way of reaching customers using email and image personalisation. Yesterday we sent out the ecard by email to over 3,200 contacts.
We created the personalised image in this ecard using XMPie uImage. The background picture changes to reflect the sender's city and each sender could add his or her own personalised message to the photo. Staff flagged contacts in from our CRM database to recieve the card, and could add their own personalised message for each contact, which appeared on the ecard. I've decided to share the details of how we put this campaign together, to demonstrate how you can leverage Photoshop and uImage to create effective personalised images.
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Posted on Thursday, 13 December 2007 at 1:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Naughty or Nice?
Publicis Digital have created presentrun.com.au; a seasonal viral campaign for Hertz Australia. This humorous website is not for the faint hearted — but if you're ready for the ride, let Santa pick you up and see what he's got in store for you...
The campaign uses image personalisation and versioning to add relevance, and although it doesn't touch the Dexter campaign, it's still pretty effective.
Posted on Friday, 14 December 2007 at 5:14 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)
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)
Political Calendars
The Sydney Morning Herald picked up a story today on personalised calendars for parliamentarians. Australian business work hard to lubricate lobbyists in Parliment House with endless gifts, from beer holders, t-shirts and other tasteless presents. However, pharmaceutical firm Pfizer has struck gold by sending personalised image calendars to all new occupants of the Parliament House's ministerial wing.
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Posted on Friday, 14 March 2008 at 11:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
What's That Font?
When creating personalised images, it's often necessary to match a typeface so you can incorporate a personalised message in the image. It could be a text on a banknote, a road sign, a champagne bottle, a tin of food, or any other object featuring text.
MyFonts.com has a useful resource where you can upload image-based text and your image will be scanned, the individual characters will be identified, and you'll be presented with a list of similar or matching fonts to the typeface used in the image. Give it a try for yourself at www.myfonts.com/WhatTheFont.
Posted on Sunday, 30 March 2008 at 8:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Design Police
The printing industry is plagued with examples of bad design. It's just a sad reality of print. Usually created by folks with little or no design experience, there's a whole lot of creative out there that serves injustice to print.
This equally applies to variable-data printing. While there are many software products that enable you to create personalised printed documents, there are some people who should to be banned from using them. I'm talking about those who see an impressive mail piece created by some specific VDP software and think "oh, I can design that with this software!" No, they can't. There's just some stuff that needs to be left to real designers.
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Posted on Monday, 31 March 2008 at 9:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Don't Try This At Home
I'm always upset whenever I see bad use of image personalisation. It's great that this technology exists, but just because you can buy the software, doesn't necessarily qualify you to use it. I believe many print providers get excited when they see the type of effects can be achieved with image personalisation software, but it's comparable to looking at the back of an Adobe Photoshop box and saying "wow, I can create effects that look like this!" Sure you can, but you need to have half a creative brain in the first place. Just because you have a design tool doesn't make you a designer.
I picked an article in a local print magazine today that features a story on a well-known pharmaceutical company. The company worked with their print provider to incorporate a personalised image in an eight-page direct mail brochure targeting Doctors. While the story didn't share any results on the campaign effectiveness and ROI, I'm sure it caught the attention of the recipients, but probably for all the wrong reasons. The print provider used image personalisation software to create an effect similar to the famous Hollywood Walk of Fame sidewalk, but it really misses the mark.
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Posted on Tuesday, 15 April 2008 at 2:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Character Images
Several image personalisation solutions (XMPie uImage, DirectSmile and others) let you create characters from individual images, so recipient names can appear in alphabet soup, cubes, dominoes, etc. While these types of image personalisation effects can look impressive, they usually take a considerable amount of time to create as you need to create individual images for the entire alphabet then mask out the background for each 'character image'.
Well, I've found a nice resource for creating different character image effects. iStockphoto is an online stock photography service with an extensive collection of affordable images. If you search their site for the term 'alphabet', you'll see a large selection of pre-shot images that use different objects to create characters, including coffee beans, shells, sand, cubes and more. Some alphabets even suggest appropriate backgrounds. A handy resource, which could save a lot of time!
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Posted on Friday, 20 June 2008 at 12:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)