Article prepared by C. Clint Bolte, C. Clint Bolte & Associates, Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. For additional information please call 717-263-5768, fax 717-263-8945, or e-mail to clint@clintbolte.com.

TransPromo Summit 2009

Time To Just Do IT

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).”

Larry Beasley, Cathedral Corporations’ Vice President of Marketing and Corporate Planning out of Rome, NY, and William Chan, Billing Manager for Broadview Networks described Broadviews’ transpromo progress in the recent four years. During this period of time Broadview has had extensive growth by corporate merger and acquisition. As print service provider, it was Cathedral’s job to take the legacy billing files from all of these new acquirees and output invoices to clients along with usable accounting data files to corporate headquarters to assist cash management. In this account migration process, billing formats were consolidated, the transition from monochrome to color printing was achieved, and fewer pages were actually printed which resulted in both printing and postage savings.

In his second year of presenting Humana’s transpromo story and progress, Chris Nicholson, Director of Strategic Communications, said that Humana now has 19 different transpromo applications. Humana has also initiated a business relationship with Linkwell, a specialized media insert marketer, to sell Humana’s white space on client bills and statements. Linkwell is selling in the Healthcare space and Humana has veto power over any ad presented to them. No economics were shared with the audience. Humana does not work with any advertising agencies and they produce all of these transpromo documents inhouse on Kodak Versamarks installed in 2005.

Roger Gimble, Founder of Digital Print Consultant Gimble & Associates, was hired by SynQ Solutions, a print services provider, to help sell Aaron Rents, Inc. on transpromo and to facilitate a successful transition. It is interesting to note that Gimble refuses to make a basic transpromo presentation to any corporate end user that will not agree to have both their CMO and CIO sitting in on the presentation. It was also interesting that after due diligence and upon Aaron’s approval to proceed Gimble recommended the lowest volume 160 stores out of Aaron’s 1,600 stores to comprise the pilot billing statement. He rationalized to management that improvement in sales from good stores could be due to several reasons. However, growth from the slow producers would be more assuredly attributed to the transpromo program. (It would also seem logical to anyone with any sales and marketing sensitivity that even a modest bump in sales from the corporate dogs would make the C-suite absolutely ecstatic in the kind of economy that existed in 2008.) The 3.4% response rate from the campaign covered the $175,000 transpromo startup costs many times over assuring an on-going and expanded relationship for all vendors with Aaron Rents.

Jim Hamilton, Infotrends Group Director, presented the future hardware trends affecting transpromo; (1) hybrid offset/digital print engines with good economics, (2). high speed continuous color on coated stocks, (3) fifth station printing capability for spot color, MICR, coatings, and special effects, and (4) improved speed, quality, and economics on fully digital equipment.

Alex Sumarta, Infotrends Director, presented his firm’s transpromo software projections; (1). Campaign analytics and measurement as closed loop, (2) campaign dashboard and integration with existing enterprise tools (business intelligence and client relationship management (CRM)), (3) multi-channel campaign management, and (4) automatic processing for message delivery to multiple channels including support for more channels - PURLS, mobile, and social media.

Regardless of the myriad different industry transpromo potential applications throughout the world, there exists proven hardware and software to accomplish certainly the initial runs up to many thousands. These vendors along with a growing potpourri of independent consultants are also available to guide both the end user and print service provider through the decision-maze to successful applications. The resulting economics is overwhelming favorable for any end user who follows the basic tenets proven to be successful. Based upon this obvious reality, the theme for this year’s Transpromo Summit, Just DO it! actually highlights a near universal frustration on behalf of anyone and everyone remotely knowledgeable of transpromo - why won’t the end users get off the dime and do something!!!

Article prepared by C. Clint Bolte, C. Clint Bolte & Associates, Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. For additional information please call 717-263-5768, fax 717-263-8945, or e-mail to clint@clintbolte.com.