iPhone and Going Postal Cardashian

The wonderful graphics industry website in the UK (Print Week) had an article online Monday (5 July 2010):

http://www.printweek.com/news/1014127/ADP-launches-postcard-app-iPhone/

The opener to the article by Jez Abbott revealed:

"Advantage Digital Print (ADP) has launched an iPhone app that enables users to create and upload postcards that the company then prints and sends.

Post cards created on the iPostcard app are sent via FTP at 4pm every day and are then printed on 300gsm card on the Dorchester printer's Xerox iGen4 press.

They are given a UV gloss finish, collected by Royal Mail at 5.15pm and sent anywhere in the world. iPostcards cost 99p for UK and £1.49 for worldwide delivery."

Wait a minute, we said, wasn't there a Illinois printing firm that had done something similar ??? and Google agreed, and reminded us of the PixyMe app for the iPhone:

http://www.mobilecommercedaily.com/pixyme-app-drives-sales-of-virtual-physical-postcards/

Note especially, the image personalization feature of the PixyMe app, and that in addition to printed postcards, the messages can be sent via several social media platforms.  Frank DeFino Jr. at Tukaiz is a heckuva marketeer, and he may have been one of the first to create an iPhone app for post card production, but by no means was he the only one; Kevin Kurz, president of PrintYourLife.com in Tucker, Georgia got his app team rocking in 2008:

http://www.printyourlife.com/About.html

And in that red sauce (ersatz?) state of Bolonga, Italy, your iPhone can hook up with Postino courtesy of:

http://www.angurialab.com/

 And in fact, ADP is not alone in the UK, TouchNote.com is also in the field:

http://www.touchnote.com/all-about/about-touchnote/more-about-the-company/

What we like about all of these efforts is the presence of mind (and probably a few freakishly smart IT felleristas too :) to not be run over in despair by the onrush of new technology but rather to leverage it to build new markets, and new opportunities.

And since a moving picture always tells the story rather well, here's a You Tube video featuring the legendary Apple Macintosh software developer Bill Atkinson showing his post card app for the iPhone.

Cheers,

Kevin Keane

Gallery and Google analytics

A simple search command:  "International Gallery" is entered into the maw of the algorithm driven super-duper computers and presto:

http://www.merrillcorp.com/news-releases_2398.htm

and

Whether for reasons of corporate pride, or honoring the teamwork of dedicated employees or, perhaps most important, saluting a valued client, market savvy designers/printers/finishers and more understand the connections their clients make between award winning promotion and comprehension of the clients marketing vision.

Our Mission-Mandate at the IAPHC, The Graphics Professionals Resource Network is to Educate/Promote/Inform/Connect all members with the global graphic community.

Educate:

We belong to an ever growing list of social networking groups related to the graphic arts and we are "likers," (formerly "fans") of many printing and graphics company Facebook Pages.

One of the LinkedIn Groups we like best (and highly recommend to you) is Market Your Printing Company, a group started by Mary Beth Smith.

Last month, Scott Cappel, owner of Sorrento Mesa Printing Company in San Diego asked members of that group to evaluate his new website.  He offered a useful tool (EDUCATE) and two new friends of ours, Patrick Whelan of Great Reach Inc, and prepress guru/visionary Gordon Pritchard weighed in with some useful nuggets too:

PROMOTE:

Making publicity work for you and your firm is made easier when you have newsworthy news to share,  And winning awards is a time tested model to get your name in lights, as it were.

Millmar Paper's Xtreme Coated Cover Wins Best of Show at On Demand
After winning both gold and silver ADDYs at the 2009 Philadelphia Ad Club Awards Show, Xtreme Coated Cover's For Xtreme Ideas Only swatch book has claimed yet another prestigious award, being recognized with a Best of Show in the Innovations in Paper Usage and Substrates category at the 2009 On Demand Conference & Exposition. The award and the awards show were presented in partnership with InfoTrends, a leading market research firm.

Matt Feldman, president of Millmar Paper is an IAPHC member, and we have congratulated him for the above publicity, and of course encouraged him to enter the Xtreme Coated Cover swatch book in the 2010 International Gallery.  IAPHC member Jay Mandarino's CJ Graphics often enters swatch books printed for such firms as Neenah Paper,  Trina May and Laura Weber of GPA, Specialty Substrate Solutions entered a swatch book for the GPA Ultra line 2 years ago, and won Gold. (GPA is a new Association Partner Program {APP} patron member of the IAPHC and we thank all our friends as that very busy company.)  Lisa Richards, then marketing VP at Central Lewmar Paper entered a swatch book printed by Pomco Graphic Arts in Philadelphia in the 2008 International Gallery and it too won Gold.

Every one of of the aforementioned firms obtained publicity from their Gallery successes.  You need to PROMOTE your firm in good times and in bad, and we think that it's an essential yet little comprehended benefit of entering the International Gallery.  We know everyone is time pressed and over stressed, but Promotion has power with prospective clients.

Patrick Whelan, as we have noted before, assists printing companies and IAPHC member firms such as Twill Printing in Berkeley Heights New Jersey(George Twill, company president is our member connection) and Foster Printing in Michigan City Indiana (Gene Toepfer, Director of Sales is our member connection.)

Both firms use an excellent monthly e-newsletter service provided by Patrick and we often republish them to the IAPHC LinkedIn Group as it is sooooo easy to do that trick when the Share button is included right in the e-news.

And in so doing we promote Twill and Foster and Great Reach too!

We have also said, that we like Twill Printing's e-newsletter because one sees pictures of George, his brother Peter and other key managers along with their direct e-mail addresses.  Because that time pressed phenomenon applies to your customers and your prospective clients too, making it easy to find you, and using a picture to make a human connection just makes good business sense.

A photo of the handsome crew at Twill, note the array of International Gallery Awards on the wall behind the team.

The other day we visited a dentist whose team were all grads of Mengele's Musee of Molar Misery,  As we waited in abject apprehension, we picked up a magazine called Cabin Life.  And right there in the masthead of this niche publication produced by Kalmbach Publishing in Milwaukee was this:

Winner 2 Gold Eddie Awards

Winner 17 Gold MMPA Awards

Winner 2 Gold Ink Awards

Winner Premier Print Award

and we suddenly had a new Gallery prospect and of course can promote Kalmbach Publishing too!

Hemlock Printers Ltd based in Burnaby, British Columbia is one of the most heavily decorated printers in the annual International Gallery events, and of course other competitions as well:

www.iaphc.org/images/iaphc/Documents/sappipressrelease_0510.pdf

In our opinion, the most market savvy printers clearly recognize that awards success enjoyed on behalf of clients and their favourite projects will pay dividends of client loyalty and continued patronage.  And that's a value proposition hard to beat.

INFORM:

We thought Gordon Pritchard's comments above with regard the Sorrento Mesa website were interesting.  We visit websites of printing and graphic arts firms all around the world on a daily basis.  We wonder why more firms don't see the implicit reality of today's e-commerce world.  If you want to INFORM clients You Have to Put  a FACE on IT.

Gordon says he would like to know the people he might be working with.

As just noted, Twill Printing makes a human connection just by including a picture.

This correspondent can win accolades in the homely visage awards but think about this gentle reader, when you bump across a Facebook profile or a LinkedIn profile which has no picture, are you intrigued? or somehow a little frustrated that you can't really connect with an empty box.

Just today, we saw an awesome illustrated article on WhatTheyThink.com and wanted to congratulate the printing firm in question, but there is no way to make a connection, no individual persons are listed on the firm's website, no e-mails, and of course no pictures, ergo no human connection.

And of course we get the obvious objections, you don't have your e-mails on your website so you can avoid spam, and you don't show all your employees and their e-mails and their pictures as staff turnover means you would have to update your site regularly.   Uh huh, and so?  Aren't you sending an unintentioned message (resembling the bird) to a world which is ever more connected, and visual, and digitally enabled in a gazillion ways?

By the way, if you visit Sorrento Mesa's website or that of CJ Graphics, you will see that two very different printing firms are very much alike in the pride they take in marketing their award winning prowess.  Maybe because both firms are acknowledged to be great marketers themselves?

CONNECT:

The best (i.e., worst) excuse we get for not entering the International Gallery?

"Oh, we really don't print anything of quality here."

Uh huh,

Reminds one of the fishing guide who tells his customers, "you have to bait your own hooks, I can't stand those icky worms."

Awards won are a very important form of testimonial for the trustworthiness of a firm.  That's why you see so many news releases, pictures and stories all over the IAPHC website under the International Gallery button and sub-sections.  And again we salute the firms and their press releases at the beginning of this post.  It matters pilgrims!

Another interesting objection we hear is that, "well, our clients only care about awards won in a local competition."

Uh huh.

And all of your customers refuse to sell to a client if they are located in another city or province, or God Forbid, another country?  NOT!

Local awards are huge, and we salute any firm who supports local or area competitions.  But let's not miss the cachet of an International Award in the eyes of a delighted client.  This is a global economy, act Global (enter the International Gallery) and celebrate Local!

And so we come to the globe trotting goodness of Gallery, as we CONNECT one designer/printer/finisher with a particular skill set we learned about by virtue of our close review of every single entry, to another party located somewhere, but almost never local, with an expressed urgent need to do business with our specially skilled provider no matter where located.

Thus, in recent weeks, Jeff Mayer in Hopewell Junction, NY needed a web printer in the SW quadrant of the US.  Mike Smith in Vancouver needed a printer in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.  Kevin Sperazza in Connecticut needed a silk screen printer in Orlando, Florida,  Cindy Johnson in Moline, Illinois needed a provider of printed 'puff magnets' somewhere in the Midwest section of the US, Roy Stout in Lexington, Kentucky needed info on printing removable tattoos and it mattered not where the provider was located.

In every case, we could CONNECT them with a solution thanks to past International Gallery entry participation by XYZ firm.

That then is the lastest/bestest reason to enter the International Gallery, it can be unexpectedly good for business if we connect you to a new client located somewhere, anywhere.

We do understand that time is the enemy, and so to make entering the 2010 International Gallery as simple as possible, we ask you to click HERE to download an easy to complete, MS Word version of the Call for Entries to the International Gallery.  PLEASE NOTE that the ship to address, as noted on the Call for Entries has changed.

Aimee Brown of Teldon Print Media in Vancouver BC told us this week she is readying "many cartons of sure fire winners" and we look forward to their receipt.  You just never know when some additional EPIC Connection may arise.  In 2008, Teldon entered several pieces for a firm called Resort Trades:

Cheers,

Kevin Keane

Target Floors It

There it was, printed in ravishing Target Red, a display ad across the bottom of page A5 of the Minneapolis StarTribune of 2 June 2010, and then, making use of the visual power of the printed page and with respect for the imagination of the reader, blasting up the vertical length of the page, obliterating the copy in columns 5 & 6 is an image of the Target sponsored Indy Car run by Dario Franchitti, who in another life is known as Mr. Ashley Judd, but we digress.

Regrettably, a wandering search of the StarTribune online ads section only found the above portion of the ad, altho it you look closely, you can see in the lower left hand quadrant a few of the letter fragments 'blown away' by the screaming #10 car.  If you are based in the US, and can find your local paper of that date, you might be able to find the ad.

What struck us about the ad was the possibility of making it even more alive than the wonderful creativity shown in the printed newspaper ad. 

We posted an article to the IAPHC Facebook Group Page this morning and the preface suggested:

"We spent some time over the weekend in and around the house where Garrison Keillor reputedly wrote the Lake Wobegon sagas. His take in the New York Times (printed edition no less) on the future of book publishing was funny; perhaps veiled in his not always obvious meanings, and stirred up a hornets nest of reaction. It’s the reaction that I find worth noting. The iPAD is awesome, we get that. But it may teach us that Print as a Powerful Partner in the Media Mixology can be an attained goal, and may breathe some life into our (forgive the punnery) ‘hide-bound’ industry. The next hire in your prepress department likely ought to be a louche young feller(ista) who has been working as a video game developer, he / she will understand the potential of merging multi-media into print products seamlessly (or perhaps more accurately – vice-versa!) and as a happy marriage. The question will be – are we flexible enough to embrace this wild and woolly new western frontier?"

http://atlantapost.com/2010/05/27/publishing%E2%80%99s-not-dead-the-industry-responds-to-garrison-keillor/

By the way, that article is one of no less than 30 articles of interest to anyone in the global graphic arts that have been posted by the loopy leprechaun lawyer just since May 22, 2010.  As befits a global mindset, they include articles from Australia, and England and Germany and Scotland. There is no cost or obligation to join the IAPHC Facebook Group, so we cordially invite you to join post-haste and become a part of the conversation; just click this link:

Facebook | IAPHC, Inc.

Some of the 'articles' referenced are actually videos, as it is so ridiculously easy to share all kinds of imagery on Facebook, Linked In and their brethren.  Like let's say for example that you were a blogging writer and really wished you could find a photo of the full page Target Ad, and then thought, well hey, I do have a very poor camera in my cell phone:

On 1 June 2010, Chief Marketer (an online news service for CMO's) published an interesting article about how Hollywood is dealing with the challenges of taking a Nickelodeon cartoon hero and turning that flat image into cinema magic (The Last Airbender) in the post Avatar era. The article, by Beth Negus Viveiros was titled:

Video Game Marketing: How to Bend an Animated Brand

The article included this:

"'Cross-promotional efforts will include incorporating the video game into film partners' online, print, packaging and media initiatives, as well as teaming up with them at retail,' says Clemmer, noting that sweepstakes will also be part of the campaign."

That's exactly what we meant when we wrote the preface to the IAPHC Facebook Group page post about Garrison Keillor earlier.  Print isn't dead.  Creativity such as the Target Indy 500 ad celebration proves that print can still be in-your-face eye catching.

Print when used collaboratively, and incorporated into the media mix still helps deliver the message of the marketer.  In fact, when we reflect on the amazing point of sale posters we have seen submitted to the International Gallery in the past few years to help market the arrival of a video game such as Gears of War, Volume 712, (a fictional title said Beau Geste)  well it's a pointed proof that print still perfects the message.

And any designer/printer/finisher who doesn't appreciate the marketing/public relations/CRM bonanza that winning an International Gallery award on behalf of client can mean, well, that is certainly lamentable, but happily quite fixable -- just download the Call for Entries to the 2010 International Gallery right HERE.

Maybe the Apple iPAD rather than foreshadowing the end of the printed word, will spur a new renaissance of creativity in the global graphic arts and a re-defining of the multi-disciplinary skill sets that are required by an extremely visual age.

Print is visual, as are pictures of both the static and the moving kind.  Tools like the Apple iPAD allow one to use all the visual weapons in the armory, and how can that be a bad thing?  (well designed, of course!)

CODA:  Take a look at the Target ad in conjunction with their sponsor partners.  Consumer brands who benefit greatly from mass marketing exposure.  We have a growing roster of sponsor-patrons of the IAPHC, our web work, and our premiere event -- The International Gallery.

We thank companies like Xerox and Kodak and Heidelberg and all the others listed on our sponsors page, they are supporting the global graphic arts industry thru their sponsorship patronage.  It is therefore a targeted form of sponsorship -- celebrating Pride in Print (and other visual extravaganzas) and is arguably more important than trying a shot-gunned mass market branding exercise like sponsoring an ad on the dasher boards of an NHL team's arena.

Our friend Laura Shore, is Senior Vice President for Communication and Innovation Strategies for Mohawk Paper.  (You have to love Laura's job title in these interesting times we live in !) She joined our IAPHC Facebook Group recently and posted this note on 20 May 2010:  "Please send an invitation to Mohawk, I'd love to sign us up."

If you are a vendor/supplier of graphic arts products and services and wish to support our efforts to harness the power of social media, thought leadership and one amazing celebration of print and the other visual arts (the annual International Gallery) please contact us at kkeane1069@aol.com and we will speed a no obligation value-priced invitation to you.  Western States Envelope has sponsored our efforts for the past dozen years:

 In a message dated 5/27/2010 10:20:25 A.M. Central Daylight Time, Mark@westernstatesenvelope writes:

Kevin,

I approved the invoice today. We are proud to be a sponsor, and we appreciate everything you do for our industry, and also for us individually.


Regards


Mark

Mark S Lemberger
President
Western States Envelope & Label Co