You’re in the News
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.
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Posted on Sunday, 7 June 2009 at 3:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)
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)
Myer’s DM Spree
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.
Posted on Monday, 13 April 2009 at 4:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Digital Flywheel
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.
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Posted on Thursday, 9 April 2009 at 3:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
APPE Not Ready for VDP?
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.
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Posted on Friday, 20 February 2009 at 4:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)
Valentine Video
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.
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Posted on Friday, 13 February 2009 at 3:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)