VeeDeePee

Videos From Down Under

2009-08-14T03:25:38Z

David Billington from Australian-based Messages on Hold pointed me to a couple of personalised videos they have developed. Check out www.jpmoneybags.com and www.worldsgreatestbusinessmind.com.

While both videos are a little cheesy and one uses the old news theme (which I'm not a big fan of), they certainly both get a good chuckle factor. I look forward to seeing more personalised video campaigns from Messages on Hold in the near future!

PURL Primer

2009-07-22T01:59:16Z

This weeks edition of The Seybold Report Dispatch (a free e-newsletter of printing and publishing events and stories) includes complimentary articles in an interactive PDF report (download here). 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.

Heidi explains that as with any marketing approach, the effectiveness of PURLs is ultimately dependent on its implementation. While several case studies tout incredible results (quote: "RT Associates, a printing service provider, achieved a phenomenal 93% response rate using personalised URLs"), we only hear about successful case studies. The article cautions "Folks only hear the good results. They don't hear about the testing, the failures, the re-testing and the broken launches". I couldn't have put it better myself.

I was pleased to read that Heidi correctly identifies that a PURL only acts a response mechanism—forming part of what should be a larger, integrated solution. You need to feed the print, email, SMS and PURLs from a single database. While Heidi forecasts that "most (if not all) web-to-print, 1:1 printing and multichannel marketing solutions will likely include a personalised URL capability by default [in the future]", it's important to remember that unified marketing communications can only be achieved through an integrated solution.

In summary, this nine page report is a good primer for those wanting to learn more about PURLs and certainly worth a read!

You're in the News

2009-06-07T04:18:43Z

I'm back online after neglecting my blog for a few weeks. Actually I never went offline, but a couple of trips (XMPie Users Group Conference in Vegas and PacPrint in Melbourne) combined running my own company, has knocked me around and I've hardly had enough time for my day job, let alone blog. But hopefully that is starting to change.

One thing I've noticed over the past few months is the increase in personalised video campaigns. A handful of providers are mastering the art of leveraging Flash to include personalised elements (text and images) in video, and their techniques are steadily improving. At the Users Group conference last month, DME (who has a dedicated production team and studio for video personalisation) demonstrated their latest personalised video campaigns, which included some very realistic and impressive effects—a notable improvement from their earlier work. DME now use Adobe Flash Media Interactive Server to stream their personalised videos, which enables a better viewing experience than streaming Flash objects directly from the web server, as the server includes a quality-of-service monitoring feature that detects changes in your viewer's bandwidth and smoothly switch between streams during playback--helping to ensure a high-quality, uninterrupted stream.

After reviewing the many recent personalised video campaigns live today, one thing that's alarmingly obvious is that they almost all follow the same theme—a TV News Report. Here's just a collection of campaigns that I've recieved over the past few months, and they all follow a news story:

Like image personalisation, running the same theme over-and-over again quickly tires the humour (and viral) element from the campaign. While a TV news report where "you" are the story easily lends itself to a wide variety of campaigns, it's a lazy, overused and plagiarised idea.

In advertising, "borrowing" a concept from another ad is despised within the industry—people get very upset when an agency "re-creates" another agency's ad concept or execution. But taking someone else's idea is not only lazy, it's cheating. Anyone can do that.

So, if you're in the business of producing personalised video campaigns (you all know who you are), I urge you to drop the news theme. It's quickly reducing the effectiveness of this emerging personalisation media, which has a lot of opportunity. So please, start using it properly and effectively.

Experiencing Cross-Media

2009-04-13T18:49:52Z

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.

Over the past few weeks I've been working with Centrica, a service provider who recognise this challenge and have worked to address it through developing a complete online "experience". Together, we've developed what we consider to be a website that effectively communicates what cross-media is, how it works, and how it can be applied to support a marketing strategy. To round this off, we've created a cross-media experience that is, well, simply "out of this world". Experience it for yourself at www.centricadigital.com.au.

Myer's DM Spree

2009-04-13T05:05:26Z

Australian retail giant, Myer, has disclosed that during 2009 it will focus it's marketing spend on targeted, direct marketing to Myer One card holders--in fact it will spend more on DM to store card holders than all of its other advertising put together. Myer explained that they plan to leverage their customer data from their existing 2.7 million card holders, who are clustered into groups and segmented into three tiers (based on annual spend). The intent of Myer's DM focus is to become more relevant to their customers.

Other FMCG businesses should be taking a leaf out of Myer's marketing strategy. In the current economy, targeted relevant marketing is key to influencing customer purchasing behaviour—and retaining them.

Read the full story at B&T »

Digital Flywheel

2009-04-09T04:13:33Z

I recently came across a web-based tool named Digital Flywheel. Developed by Database Publishing Consultants, Inc. or DPCI, Digital Flywheel has been developed as a add-in for existing business applications—for example marketing web portals, where users can create customised documents and collateral on-demand from a template library.

What makes Digital Flywheel unique from other solutions is that it uses a Rich Internet Application to present the document template and customise it, while the document template is an InDesign document and InDesign Server is used on the backend for document composition. I've commented on some of the main areas that I've identified within the solution.

Assigning Variable Tags
Digital Flywheel allows the user to tag the InDesign template directly within the web application. The advantage of this is that the end-users (perhaps a marketing department) doesn't need to know how to use InDesign; they simply receive the templates from a designer, upload them to Digital Flywheel, and then the page is rendered in the web browser where they can assign the variables to the page objects by "marking up" selected objects with the corresponding variable tag. In addition to inserting variable elements in page objects, Digital Flywheel also enables users to insert nested variables inside a block of text.

Assigning variable tags to page objects. Click image to enlarge.

Assigning data sources
Data can either be applied to templates from a data file (e.g. XML), or defined by the end user. Users can either use a single data source, for example campaign promotion information, or connect to a database and create for merging templates with customised data.

Interface Controls
Perhaps one of the most intriguing and impressive elements of Digital Flywheel is it's level of control and relative simplicity. Essentially, DPCI has developed a dumbed-down version of InDesign, where they provide some basic tools to let users move objects around the page, resize frames and their contents. When resizing image frames, the non-image area is displayed with an opaque background, mimicking InDesign's behaviour.

In addition to drag-and-drop controls, Digital Flywheel also provides more precise editing of page objects through changing x and y coordinate values, object scaling and set object angles, all defined in value boxes. When you make a change the effect is immediately applied to the page.

In addition, all available swatches in the InDesign document are available to the end-user and can be applied to page objects, including strokes, text, etc.

VDP Support
While Digital Flywheel certainly delivers an impressive user experience, it's unclear on their level of support for VDP. The solution does not appear to support common VI languages, such as PPML, VPS, VIPP or others, as their list of print export options is limited to PDF and PostScript. Perhaps someone from DPCI can clarify whether they produce optimised print files (i.e. reuse common elements).

Summary
The user experience offered by Digital Flywheel is quite impressive. The level of intuitive user control in the RIA environment makes it easy-to-use, without the need for any elaborate set of instructions.

One of the main criticisms for delivering page layout tools in a RIA environment has been in the differences between the composition environment of the Web-based interface (typically Flash or Silverlight) and the backend composition engine (InDesign Server, Quark Server, XSL-FO, other). Both the RIA and composition engine use different paragraph composers, and as a result, the page that is rendered and presented in the RIA isn't necessarily what will be produced in the final document output. However, an interesting point to note is that Adobe Flash Player 10 has the ability to emulate the paragraph composer used by InDesign. While it's unclear which RIA is used in Digital Flywheel (maybe someone from DPCI can clarify), support for this new feature in Flash Player 10 (if it's not already supported) shows promise for the future of document template editing in RIA-enabled solutions.

In summary, Digital Flywheel is an impressive solution and is certainly worth a closer look. You can learn more and view an online demo on the Digital Flywheel product page.

APPE Not Ready for VDP?

2009-02-20T06:39:32Z

At drupa last year, Adobe announced Adobe PDF Print Engine (APPE) 2, a new version of Adobe's PDF interpreter and ultimate successor to CPSI (Configurable PostScript Intepreter)—the interpreter used in many RIPs and print controllers.

In this new version, Adobe introduced support for digital printing and specifically, optimised the engine for jobs with VDP characteristics and will support the emerging PDF VDP ISO standard; PDF/VT which is scheduled for release later this year.

This turning point in Adobe's intepreter direction represents a significant milestone for VI languages, as APPE only consumes PDF. As a result, this engine cannot be used with many popular VI languages, such as PPML, VPS, VIPP and more.

I've been having a dialogue with Todd Kueny from Lexigraph over the past few days. Lexigraph offer a suite of tools for VI language transformations and workflows and has substantial experience in this area. They also have strong knowledge in PDF and they have developed their own C++ PDF library, built "from scratch", specifically designed for performance.

Todd made some interesting and rather concerning observations on APPE, which he has given me permission to share:

"First off, there are horrific performance issues—mostly to do with large page-count PDFs. I feel Adobe does not understand large page count PDF workflows, their tools are fundamentally not designed to support them, and as a company they have no interest in it.
Second, the PDF architecture is basically frozen at 1.5 in commercial workflows—again for a number of reasons mostly having to do with useless features that complicate later versions. So much of what they think is important is not and wastes time with users.

Third, supposedly APPE will support PDF/VT at some point in the future. PDF/VT will be a catastrophic failure—mostly because its a standard being created by people who have 1) never done large page count workflows, 2) like JDF way too much, 3) done understand why PPML and PDF are failures in this area already, and 4) have nothing better to do—though in this economy I doubt the development of the standard will continue much longer. I was involved in the development of VDX—look where that's gotten NexPress—so I know what I am talking about.

Fourth, personally I do not believe they really understand parallelism in RIPs adequately—this is from my personal experience with customers who have had to resolve RIP issues with the Adobe RIP support group. Basically Adobe still thinks RIP operate desktop printers and haven't figured out how to "do the right" thing with the PDF. This is why I have two related US patents and why we are still around despite their best efforts to be everything to everyone in the RIP arena."

I'm personally not really qualified to comment in this area—haven't had too much involvement with PDF/VT to-date, other than acting as an observer to its development. On the comment of Adobe's knowlege of parallel RIP processing, again, I am unqualified to comment, but I recall that Adobe have dabbled in this area years ago with the introduction of Adobe Extreme; a CPSI-based parallel RIP workflow which was scrapped in the mid-late 90's.

While Todd's comments and critism are somewhat harsh, I'm keen to hear from others working in this area (Adobe?) for an alternate opinion and comments on Todd's remarks—to see if they are well-founded. Or not.

Valentine Video

2009-02-13T05:43:23Z

With Valentines Day just around the corner, it was good timing that I received a link to this personalised video campaign. Created by Focus Imaging in Hong Kong, the video not only incorporates the name of their recipient, but also their picture. Site visitors can enter their valentines name, along with a message and upload a photo.

While this campaign doesn't match the level of creativity of Kodak's impressive Make Me Super viral campaign, this is another good example of the flexibility of Flash—and how you can use both text and image variables to create an engaging personalised experience.

We Know Where You Live

2009-02-11T07:53:02Z

I came across an innovative mail piece the other day. Google sent out a direct mail campaign to 600,000 UK small businesses, selling online advertising space. The mail piece was in the form of a letter, but what I found interesting was the accompanying envelope which incorporated a personalised map, mapping the recipients mailing address (personalised using XMPie software).

In a market where you're constantly striving for new creative and marketing methods to "get the envelope open", this execution surely must have gained the attention and interest of many recipients.

2d Magazine

2009-02-08T10:17:31Z

I've received a handful of emails regarding my last entry on QR codes. One of which was from Roger Smolski who drew my attention to his online magazine dedicated to the world of 2D barcodes. If it's got a 2D barcode on it, then Roger's got it covered. Check out his informative magazine at 2d-code.co.uk. Oh, and you don't need a 2D capable-device to read it. ☺

QR Hype

2009-02-06T06:55:29Z

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.

While its use has largely been limited to outdoor and media advertising, there's plenty of opportunity for the technology to be extended to personalised mail. As QR Codes provide a convenient response mechanism (you don't have to be in front of a computer) users can access the website immediately, no matter where you are. In turn, QR Codes present an opportunity in direct mail and essential mail, including bills, statements and TransPromo.

Many VDP vendors are already incorporating QR Code support into their products. XMPie recently announced QR Code support in version 4.5, Objectif Lune announced support earlier last year and Computer Output Print & Internet (COPI) offers CodeZ QR for batch generating barcodes. Despite the accessibility of the technology, it's not gaining adoption at a rate that many are hoping for. A few major brands have run QR code campaigns, but we're not seeing any significant adoption (outside of Japan) just yet. So why? I believe it's due to several reasons.

1. Software Availablity
In order to read QR codes, the mobile user requires a client-based utility to capture and decode the barcode on their handset. While there are a handful of capture utilities for the iPhone and other devices, it's not convenient for the average mobile user to go out hunting for them. Telstra pre-installs capture software on some handsets as part of their QRious campaign, but they have limited this to a select range of handsets, which seems to be more of a sales strategy than anything else. However, this is starting to change; in the US, Sprint recently announced pre-installation of the ScanLife software on a range of it's handsets, making it the first North American mobile carrier to offer 2D support across a range of handsets, and other carriers and vendors are also beginning to pre-install capture utilities on handsets.

2. Web Enabled Phones
In order to use QR codes, the mobile handset needs to be web enabled, and more importantly the mobile subscriber needs to be on a 3G or data plan. While the iPhone v2 has accelerated 3G popularity, the majority of mobile users outside of Japan don't have Internet access on their mobile devices.

3. Camera Phones
Obviously, you need a camera on your phone to capture the QR code. While the majority of handsets include cameras, not all do.

4. Social Adoption
While QR codes provide users with the ability to access information where ever they are, there are many who simply don't require immediacy of information, or have any interest in doing so. If they did, we'd all be walking around staring down at Blackberries and iPhones as we check email and surf the Internet while on an afternoon stroll. But we're not. Yet.

Summary
I'm not saying that the future of QR codes is a grim one. Far from it—I see a significant opportunity for these two-dimensional barcodes, especially in personalisation. There are a multitude of potential applications, such as using a URL linking to a personalised page with walking/driving directions and a map to a local store, or even using QR codes as a response mechanism—while QR codes can embed URLs, they can also embed other text, such as an SMS message. In Japan, advertisers embed SMS response codes in QR codes so mobile users can simply capture the code and instantly send a message to a defined SMS number.

The opportunity for QR codes undoubtedly exists and Japan has proved the technoloogy is both effective and practical. However, unless these technology and social barriers are addressed (which they will, eventually) QR codes cannot become a ubiqutous mechanism for visiting web pages from printed media. Until that time comes, the loyal qwerty keyboard prevails.

Happy New Year

2009-02-06T02:12:28Z

I know it's a bit late for a New Year greeting, but I just arrived back in Sydney last week after an extended break in the UK. My frostbite wounds are finally beginning to heal and I'm slowly getting through my inbox. I've been busy collating a whole list of interesting applications to share while I've been away and I've got plenty of interesting VDP topics to report on, so stay tuned!

XMPie Version 4.5

2008-12-17T04:50:47Z

XMPie has just released version 4.5, an updated software version to their suite of desktop and server-based VDP products. What's interesting about this new version is that among the various product enhancements, there are some significant new features that facilitate rapid deployment of cross-media campaigns. I've picked out the key feature highlights of XMPie uDirect and PersonalEffect version 4.5, which are summarised below.

U2
Previewed at drupa in May, U2 refers to XMPie's 'gossiping technology' that provides enhanced performance when running multiple instances of InDesign Server. In this unique composition approach, each server instance talks or "gossips" to other server instances during composition. So if a large job is split to run across several server instances, each instance will be aware of records processed by other instances. As a result, common assets are only generated and included once for the final print output. U2 is currently only supported for Xerox VIPP ouput. It will be interesting to see if XMPie decide to support other VI languages in the future.

XLIM Enhancements
I've never paid too much attention of XLIM, until recently. XLIM refers to a alternate template format used by XMPie uProduce for document composition. Like other XMPie templates, XLIM templates are created in InDesign, but instead of saved as InDesign templates, they are exported as XLIM templates and can then be composed by a separate XLIM engine. I recently discovered that XLIM files are actually XSL-FO templates; a markup language developed by W3C for XML document formatting of textual layout.

Due to it's relative simplistic file structure, XLIM documents can be generated at a rate of several thousand records a minute by a XLIM engine, without the requirement for InDesign Server. While XLIM (and XSL-FO) doesn't provide the same level of rich typograpical and object control as InDesign, the format is well suited for light documents, for example statements, letters, etc.

New enhancements to XLIM in version 4.5 include the support for bullets and numbering, personalised charts and graphs and all InDesign page objects (shapes, text on a path, etc).

Specialty Imaging
XMPie uDirect and PersonalEffect now supports Flourescent Marks and MicroText Specialty Imaging features in Xerox VIPP.

2D Barcodes
Barcode support has been expanded to include 2D barcodes, for generating QR Codes and other matrix-based barcodes.

RURL Wizard
This has to be the most significant new feature in XMPie's release history. One of the problems that has plagued XMPie since they changed their personalised URL architecture to ICP is that web pages reside outside of uProduce on an IIS web server. As a result, it is a manual and often awkward process to create the virtual directory, put the required dependencies in the web directory (i.e. DreamweaverCtrls.dll), add the required rewrites for the Response URLs to work—and that's before you start creating your web pages!

The RURL (Response URL) Wizard changes all that. Installed on the same IIS web server hosting the personalised web campaigns, the RURL Wizard provides an interface for quickly creating and deploying personalised web and email campaigns. By stepping through a series of options, you can create and deploy a working personalised website in minutes. The RURL Wizard automates the manual IT administration tasks required in previous versions. The wizard automatically creates the virtual directory, copies the required files and resources to the directory, creates the URL rewrite, and when you reach the 'Summary' page, your website template is already deployed and working. The generated site can then be customised as required using uCreate and Dreamweaver.

The different RURL campaign workflows are illustrated at www.RURLWizard.com/RURLTemplates. While the current Wizard doesn't include sets of designed web templates, it is understood that templates will shortly be available for purchase from XMPie Marketplace. In addition, a number of free templates will be included with future releases of the RURL Wizard.

SECURL
SECURL refers to a set of security-based features built for web campaigns. Features include CAPCHA phrases to block automated robots crawling websites, support for HTTPS through SSL certificate, and password security where the password is an XMPie content object (ADOR object).

Acquisition and Refer-a-Friend
A long awaited feature from XMPie, this feature refers to the ability to insert records into the database, rather than update existing records. A unqique URL is created at the time of record insertion. As a result, you can use a generic website (e.g. www.campaign.com) to capture website visitors and insert campaign data through ICP, or create a referal form on an existing personalised website.

Summary
In summary, it's good to see a set of new, strong and long awaited features to XMPie's product suite. XMPie are clearly continuing to push the VDP boundaries and are obviously responding to customer and market demand. I was a little surprised to learn that these new features don't work with the current version of InDesign (CS4), released in September. However it is understood that XMPie are waiting for the availablity of InDesign Server CS4 before releasing a compatible version of their desktop and server products.

Too Early For Telecom

2008-12-08T06:48:59Z

An article in Billing and OSS World (B/OSS) this month looks at the opportunity for targeted personalised advertising in the telecommunication market. The story reports how OgilvyOne and TM Forum will explore possible business models for advertisers and telecom service providers. The collaborative project will initially focus on mobile operators, helping to incorporate customer personalisation, location-based advertising, micropayments and enhanced security into customer communications. This market opportunity is estimated to be worth US$250 billion.

The potential of such communication is significant. As mobile networks are already able to track the location of their subscribers from the local base antenna they are using, this could form a framework for personalised, location-based advertising.

When you consider the amount of customer data that network operators can potentially capture on their subscribers, included visited Web sites from their Internet-enabled mobile devices, this could provide a vehicle for highly personalised and relevant advertising. For example, if you send a location-based advertisement using SMS or MMS that tells a mobile user that there's a sale across the street on high-definition televisions, it may not mean anything to them, but if you know that user has recently visited electronics Web sites searching for HDTVs, that information could be very useful and valuable to the user.

Despite the value that this type of targeted communication can bring to the consumer value chain, it appears that the telecom market has a lot of regulatory tape to cut through first. In the US and other countries, telecom privacy legislations require customer identities to be masked, so until laws can be changed to allow consumers to opt-in to receive such communication, the concept will have to remain a marketers dream.

Read the full story »

Chocolate Direct Mail

2008-11-28T06:58:49Z

In an effort to address the UK's declining direct mail volumes, Royal Mail hired Proximity London to create a sensory-based direct mail campaign. The agency used a chocolate mailing, which was contained in a heat-sensitive cover and was sent to 6,000 people at marketing and creative agencies in the UK to show how use of sensory mail could improve response rates on direct campaigns. A paper copy accompanied the chocolate letter in case recipients ate it.

The letter was designed to encourage the target audience to smell, touch and taste it, and explains the principle of engaging the senses to create more emotive connections with customers.

The campaign clearly emphasised direct mail's ability to appeal to the senses. Royal Mail claims that the campaign had a financial return six times greater than the original investment and the campaign recently won an Echo Award in Las Vegas.

A study by Brand Sense, a sensory branding consultancy, found consumers made decisions to buy particular products based on their ability to engage "sensory signals". Royal Mail said the chocolate mailing allowed direct marketers to engage with "more than three of their recipient's senses and improve campaign response rates for businesses".

While I've seen plenty of novel and innovative campaigns over the years, this is the first "unhealthy" direct mail piece that I've come across!