C. Clint Bolte & Associates

The Third Annual TransPromo Summit organized by Infotrends was held in Boston August 13-14 at the Hyatt Regency with 225 aficionados in attendance. While this number is down somewhat from last year, which the organizers attribute to the lack luster economy, it was interesting to note that a full 10% of these attendees were from Central and South America.

Successful case studies from a myriad of industry applications were among the most popular of the multi-faceted sessions. The Latin American and European case studies presented by end users contained quite explicit returns on investment experienced from their various transpromo applications. As in past conferences the North American corporate end users shared the steps and stages they went through to achieve success but seemed more reluctant to share the specific ROI results. The single exception was a case study presentation offered by the digital printing consultant and the print conversion vendor. The end user was not in attendance.

It seemed strange initially that a few of the end user case studies, such as Sweden’s Parajett and Humana headquartered in Louisville, Kentucky, were presented at last year’s summit. It became quite clear following the old adage “you walk before you run” that both these organizations had impressive advances during the past year in terms of improved breadth, depth, and sophistication of their transpromo activities.

The Introductory Track of the conference on “How to get started in TransPromo,” rehashed the basic steps, stages, and time frames. The “Executing Track stepped up the pace considerably with specific lessons learned in moving to the next level of expertise. Readers interested in the basics can review article highlights from TransPromo Summit 2008 and TransPromo Summit 2007. This article will concentrate on the leading edge transpromo practices, practitioners, and technology - hardware and software.

The Infotrends Group Leader and Conference Chair for the third year Barb Pellow keynoted the first day with the top ten reasons for transpromo NOW. Borrowing from Nike, The “Just Do IT! theme is very clear that there is no external, out-of-my-control reason for any end user of any size not to get on board and move forward initiating their own transpromo plans and initial pilot efforts. You can use virtually any existing digital print equipment already in house or resident at your current transaction document printer. For a short run pilot attempt the software and workflow currently in use will suffice as adding an onsert to replace an insert is part of TP 101 in many cases. Manually tracking the responses to the offering either to a call center or web site is cumbersome but doable.

Xerox’s Chief Engineer Anthony Frederico in his free wheeling panel discussion with the software giant GMC’s CEO Dr. Rene Muller and HP Indigo’s Vice President and General Manager Alon Bar Shany, opined “You can run transpromo with your existing hardware and software workflows. As success comes, goals for more sophisticated and powerful (capabilities) will naturally evolve.“ In a separate panel discussion on the same topic of getting started in transpromo Pat McGrew of Kodak offered the same conclusion but added that the only key investment that the company need make is that of learning about transpromo.

In discussing why there seemed to be a lag in much of the end users from coming on board with their own transpromo efforts, Frederico surmised that in his conversations there were “barriers with advertising agencies.” “They seem to be struggling with how to (maintain) control of the account.” They (ad agencies) “need to be educated” as transpromo represents a “disruption in the value stream (to agencies).” There was one representative of an ad agency in the audience during this discussion who commented, “It’s (transpromo application) a media buy.” Which implied there ought to be a way to figure out how agencies can get on board. She also acknowledged that she was assigned the task of learning what opportunities might exist for the agency in transpromo applications; but unfortunately she missed the entire first day of the conference. Therefore her response might have been a little shallow on understanding the proven success elements for transpromo.

From the first conference it was emphasized that all corporate stackholders must be on board and committed to make transpromo work. This includes C-level support, a “Champion” assigned to facilitate the project, finance, marketing, IT, production, analytics, and customer service. For the largest corporations this seems to be too many silos or fiefdoms to overcome. Hence, most of the early successful practitioners have been small to medium-sized corporate end users.

Kodak’s Data Driven Communications Evangelist, Pat McGrew, who travels extensively throughout the world added “Malaysia and Thailand do not have a direct mail tradition. Hence, transpromo is their direct mail opportunity.” The same can be said for much of the rest of the world that has had exorbitant postage rates for non-existent standard classification postage. This discounted class of mail has been part of the secret to the USA’s direct mail success. Private sector access to demographic census data has been the other driver of United States direct mail growth.

Another interesting point is the evolving definition of transpromo. An early definition included adding an informative or educational message to a transaction document made it transpromotional. Xerox’s Frederico suggested that “when messaging stops and promo starts is when the customer makes money (incrementally from the extra effort).”