It was a dark and stormy night in a city that knows how to keep its secrets. No. It was a bright and windy afternoon in the City of Big Shoulders. I had just landed at O’Hare and was waiting for my hotel shuttle.

The fifty-ish business woman to my left had no secrets. She was engrossed in a discussion on her i-Berrydroidpod oblivious to the world around her and with whom she was sharing her conversation, namely me. Now I’m not a habitual eavesdropper, but this was so blatant I couldn’t help but absorb her end of the dialogue. I’m sure you’ve all been there.

She started out with instructions to her subordinate– edits pertaining to some document: “Move this paragraph here; add the sub-head for Obstetrics there; start a new chapter on page 87; be sure and link the footnotes” & so on. By now it was obvious this had something to do with the medical profession and was some type of publication, to what purpose I could not discern. Then came the kicker—“I guess we should get a thousand printed”, she said matter-of-factly.

At that moment, my old printer instincts kicked in and my ears perked up. Although I muffled the impulse to be a good-printing samaritan and come to her rescue, calculations started rolling through my brain bucket. Let’s see, this publication whatever its purpose is most likely a minimum of one-hundred pages; times one-thousand copies is one-hundred thousand digital 8 ½ x 11 clicks at the very least. A decent job for any short-run facility.

Did she have a use for that many, or was it simply a Pavlovian response to cost-per-piece-effectiveness training she received in an earlier life?

I thought by now the digital printing industry would have finally conditioned all customers to think print-on-demand until the cows came home. It hasn’t penetrated everywhere. This job could have been suited for short-run offset, or toner-based or high-speed ink-jet digital depending on the real, albeit unknown situation. The issue was that it didn’t sound like there was any fleshing-out of the true needs of the project. “I guess we should get a thousand printed”. A nice round number.

At face value It didn’t sound like a situation that warranted a variable data application, but who knows, with the right coaching it could have turned into a marvelous project incorporating a PURL and the opportunity for users to custom-build a piece based on relevance, or to personalize an event-specific version for a particular demographic. It may have even had TransPromo applications (more likely PubPromo), all of which could have saved a tremendous amount in terms of cost and waste.

In one of my past lives many moons ago I played a game with my clients called “let’s look in the closet”. Every print buyer had a closet of one kind or another. Sometimes it was a walk-in, sometimes a warehouse. The point was to discover their printed material graveyards and guide them to more cost and resource-effective digitally-enabled behavior.

The point is that even today, while we busy ourselves with transpromo, social media and cross-disciplinary integration, we tend to forget that there are still basics to be dealt with out there in printbuyerland, and the distressing fact is that the path of least resistance remains alive and well.

As the woman hopped into her shuttle, still stridently chatting about her project without missing a beat as she handed the driver her bags, I couldn’t help but wonder if her printer, in-plant or commercial, would question the wisdom of “I guess we should get a thousand printed”. Would you?

Print in the Mix is providing access to a PODi case study on the use of personalized direct marketing to Virginia Military Institute’s alumni. The campaign included email, direct mail, Personalized URLs and video and achieved an overall direct marketing response rate of 23%:

The VMI Foundation is a private, non-profit corporation that annually raises millions of dollars in gifts and commitments for the Virginia Military Institute. DENMAR Information Technologies developed a direct marketing campaign that would engage VMI Alumni in a new and relevant manner and gather key information about alumni to be used in future fundraising campaigns. The campaign included email, direct mail, Personalized URLs and video and achieved an overall direct marketing response rate of 23%.

The case study is accessible until April 30, 2010.

Last week WhatTheyThink presented a Webinar with MindFireInc titled Does personalization really work? Statistically sound research and live use cases tell the story (Streaming Archive). The Webinar provided an overview of a study conducted by Marnie Brow, Ph.D. on response rates personalized cross-media marketing campaigns.

The study compared response rates of more than 650 real-life personalized cross-media campaigns, with data from DMA and PODi to statistically demonstrate the uplift that can be gained from relevant, personalized communications.

You can download the study free of charge from MindFireInc.

Have you noticed? The best practices for personalized URLs are becoming more sophisticated. You may not always see those best practices listed, but they are being reflected more and more often in industry case studies. It’s really neat to see the evolution.

It struck me because, earlier this week, I released an update to “Personalized URLs: Beyond the Hype,” a primer and training and educational tool for printers and marketers.  In the best practices section, I had previously separated out the best practices into two categories: those commonly seen in industry case studies and those not yet commonly seen but practiced by some of the industry’s leading practitioners. During the process of updating the report, however, it struck me the extent to which the two are converging. In fact, in the October 2009 update I removed the distinction between the two classifications.
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