C. Clint Bolte & Associates

Adding color and selling advertisements to fill remnant white space in periodic statements that consumers expect to receive seems like a drop-dead winner for all concerned. The idea is simple, but the execution a little more complex. Hence, the theme of this year’s TransPromo Summit as articulated by Conference Chair Barb Pellow, InfoTrends Group Director, in the featured keynote presentation was “The Ultimate in Simplexity.” Borrowed from a book by the same name penned by Jeffrey Kluger, Pellow explained the analogy of “simple things complex and complex things simple” is so apropos for converting transactional documents to transpromotional communications. The customer sees a simple, elegant watch, but is unaware of the complex inner workings. The Google home page and the iPhone were other products accentuating this same “simplexity” principle.

Attendance at this second annual Trans Promo Summit in New York City August 13 & 14 spiked up to 370 with a growing contingency of International participants. Drupa, only a few months earlier, was inundated with the digital print engine and software manufacturers’ hype for TransPromo. The new high speed, high quality, low cost inkjet technologies seem ideally suited to drive this innovative product offering. But appropriately so, this New York summit pealed away the onion layers of the hype to offer a plethora of successful “how to” case studies. This article will describe the key and often common elements of many of these neat applications.