Friday, September 9th, 2011
Innovative marketers routinely turned to online marketing to showcase their creativity in the last few years, but with the online noise volume reaching a feverish pitch, some have turned their attention back to print. Lucky for them, the production and printing industry has furiously been experimenting with new technologies in order to catch up with their digital-minded peers whom have stolen all the marketing glitz and kudos in recent years.
Electronics giant, Sony, frequently takes advantage of new innovations in print and digital printing to personalise and target locally. While the company continues to use a lot of offset printing, it does more variable data printing. This approach allows them to swap out text and image data to segment the creative.
“Digital printing is becoming more important as postal prices increase,” says says Salvatore Lacorte, a consultant in commercial printing at Sony. “We want to speak directly to the customer, and variable data printing allow us to do this better and helps increase sales.”
While emerging channels such as social media and mobile will continue to garner headlines, multichannel marketers realise that direct response print campaigns remain a frequent, though perhaps less talked about tool. In the US, marketing spending on direct mail actually increased 3.1% in 2010 to $45.2 billion, according to January 2011 figures released by the Winterberry Group, a marketing intelligence consulting firm. Insert media grew 2.4% to $800 million.
This year those categories will only grow more. It is predicted direct mail will
increase by 5.8% to $47.8 billion and insert media to jump 9.1% to $900 million. While direct response print suffered a 3.6% decline in 2010 to $15 billion, it is still expected to nudge up 2% this year.
“Even though companies have widespread interest in digital channels, not all of these channels are mature enough and scalable enough for the customer acquisition needs right now,” says Jonathan Margulies, a director at Winterberry Group. “By contrast, direct mail and insert media, for example, are proven, well-established media when it comes to delivering the kind of steerable response that many marketers are looking for,” adds Margulies. “Print is very reliable in a way that the digital channels aren’t yet.”
Lacorte agrees. “I am a firm believer in direct mail, because it is not evasive,” he says. “I get so much e-mail every hour that it is overwhelming, but when I get my mail, I look at it.”
Innovations in print include new approaches to campaign techniques such as quick response (QR) codes on direct mail pieces and free-standing inserts (FSIs) that can be scanned with a mobile phone to interact with digital content, 3-D printed collateral and PURLs (personalised URLs).
At the same time, new printers and printing processes have helped to create printing that is more personalised and efficient.
Bar codes extend print shelf life
QR and other 2-D barcodes, in particular, are more frequently showing up on direct mail pieces, inserts, out-of-home billboards and magazine pages. Proctor & Gamble’s Gillette brand recently worked with ad agency BBDO on a campaign to promote grooming products to young men that tied a print QR code in a magazine to online video. The “Young Guns” ad starred various athletes — Matt Ryan and Ray Rice of the NFL; Evan Longoria and Carlos González of MLB; and NASCAR drivers Denny Hamlin and Kyle Busch. The print ad, which ran as a four-page spread in the January issue of ESPN Next, tied each athlete to their own QR code. Readers were encouraged to snap a photo of the code with their phone to view an exclusive video of the corresponding athlete on their device.
