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Blow-In Some Creative Direct Mail Ideas: What Catches Your Eye?

blow-in and bind-in insert cards for direct mail

Blow-ins and Bind-ins: ever thought about why those insert cards in your direct mail work? If they didn’t, they would not be showered with so many. “Blow-in” cards (as bindery machines blow the inserts into the printed pieces during manufacture) are most famously successful for magazines and newspapers to advertise their subscription offers. Their size makes them perfect as business reply mail, coupons for in-store and online sales, or to call out special offer from within the larger print piece. “Bind-in” cards stay attached to the piece, usually with a perforation to allow removal.

Normally inserts prove bothersome by falling out inconveniently and making me stoop to pick them up, or as I browse the rest of the magazine or catalog I am trying to keep them from falling out again. Bind-in cards annoyingly cover up part of the page that I want to see. These “aggravations” are in fact part of the reason insert cards work for marketing – they force us to stop and potentially, in those extra precious seconds, notice the name or information on the card.

direct mail advertising insert cards

I recently received a catalog from Pier 1 imports, and while several blow-in cards came falling out, the one above caught my attention above the others – and prompted me to think about why. It is actually a bind-in card, but three things, in retrospect, stood out enough to make me stop and look at it, flip it over and see what it was about:

  • The design: specifically the colors. Like the type, they are loud but pleasing. The designer knew the visual had to stand out in front of a busy page full of advertised merchandise, and this design does.
  • The die cut: that icy pitcher of tart lemonade looks like it could almost be lifted off the page. Maybe I was thirsty at the time, but it made me take notice, and the outlined shape caught my eye over all the other rectangular inserts, which I totally ignored.
  • The anonymity: If the front of this card had the company logo emblazoned on it, I think my initial reaction would have been to assume I already knew what it was pushing and need not look any further. Because it looked more like a big flavorful offer for lemonade, I flipped it over and saw an offer for $50 off a purchase at Pier 1. Good marketing.

When you are planning your print marketing, take a few minutes to think about the ways direct mail or other advertising has influenced you, caught your eye, or directed your behavior. Pick up your stack of mail today and notice which piece attracts your notice the most – then try to state three reasons that particular item got your attention while others were bypassed. Learning to incorporate those sound and creative ideas into your own promotions can make your marketing dollars do a lot more work for you. Creativity will get you noticed.

 

 

Printers understand communication and design. Your printer should be able to provide you with the latest information, inspiration, technical advice, and innovative ideas for communicating your message through print, design and typography, signage, apparel, variable data printing and direct mail, integrated marketing and environmental responsible printing. They should also be able to work with you to solve any difficult prepress issues with your files. If they can’t, you have the wrong printer! The best advice, always, is to ASK YOUR PRINTER!

Call us at 828.684.4512. ImageSmith is a full-service print and marketing provider located in Arden, North Carolina. Contact us at ImageSmith for quotes on all your print and marketing projects, and more useful tips on how to create custom, effective, high impact marketing solutions.
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Gradient Banding in Wide Format Printing: Can You Prevent It?

 

A quick check online convinces me that a lot of folk – designers, artists and printers – are frustrated with gradients that print with banding, or clearly dileneated “steps” of color visible in both digital and offset printing and which can be even more dramatic in wide format output. The bottom line is that those sweet gradient tools in your design software do not come with warning labels to prepare you for the resulting output in print. Gradients will normally (but not always) look good onscreen, but the technology to print them with similar ease falls short. The current best solution is to apply PhotoShop effects to minimize or hide the banding. The drawback is just like a great medication with a not-so-great side effect, this can produce unwanted results: colors can shift and the image may print “grainier” than originally planned.

A radial gradient should ideally look smooth, like a sunburst. The sample below, however, shows how it generally prints like the Looney Tunes logo.

banding problems in gradient printing

 

 

 

There is no fix for the banding problem when saving your Illustrator files. We’ve often searched for that magic button, with no luck. Below are a few photos from a recent experiment where a stubborn orange-to-yellow gradient in a client’s wide format pop-up display printed with visible, distracting banding regardless of file type, compression or other options used. Saving the file as eps, pdf, opening in PhotoShop, increasing resolution, optimizing with PitStop…. no luck. Each resulted in the same diagonal “steps” in color.

banding in gradient printing

 

The reason these efforts fail lies in mathematics and the physics of print, and I will admit to having only a shady understanding of these technical causes. For the scope of this post, let’s just point out that there are only so many “shades” or steps between one color and the next that are renderable in print. Your goal is to make a smooth transition from one color to the next, and the CS software makes that very easy in the design phase. However, the factors at play when you try to print your creation are the size or amount of space over which that transition occurs on the printed piece, the colors you have chosen to blend, and the resolution of the printer. Mathematically, at some point the printer has to go from one “step” to the next – and often the result to the human eye are bands or lines at which those changes occur. If you have chosen colors that are close together, you have even fewer “steps” between them with which to work. While PhotoShop, Illustrator and InDesign generally render smooth gradients onscreen, the science behind image rasterization and both offset and digital printing is not so forgiving to the viewer.

The fix for our wide format print in this case was to take the gradient portion of the job into Photoshop (it was originally created in Illustrator, we think!) Step one: we applied a Gausian Blur. The amount? Well that completely depends on the image. I just decide visually, bearing in mind whether or not the image I am working on is viewed at full-size onscreen or will be enlarged when printed out. A small grain visible now will be twice as large if printed at 200%. Next we created a layer with the mode set to Overlay and checked the box “Fill with Overlay-neutral color (50% gray).” To this layer we added Noise. Again – I decide visually how much noise to use (that’s an odd statement if you think about it!). Unfortunately, it is a guessing game, but with experience you will know best how much “graininess” or added texture will be acceptable without being enough to distract or compromise the output image.

Overlay mode in PhotoShop to prevent banding of gradients

gradient banding, Illustrator Photoshop InDesign

The result here was a minor shift in colors and a slight visible texture or graininess that wasn’t there before. But both served to hide the banding problem! Both were acceptable results as the overall appearance of the gradient was smooth and pleasing.

Tips to prevent or minimize banding in gradients are easy to find online, but often your individual design is built in such a way that many of the tips seem unworkable. Like ours, the most common banding-buster tips require you create (or recreate) your gradient in PhotoShop as we did above, and then add noise to the image. However, you might have other elements in your design such as type, vectors or other effects applied in either Illustrator or InDesign which prevent you from moving the entire file into PhotoShop. If the file has been received from another person or client, then you might not have access to the individual pieces of the file and would be stuck trying to put the entire document into PhotoShop as an image in order to play around with possible filters. Apparently there is no “one size fits all” fix for this frustrating problem. Designers should be aware that gradients present difficulties and often require cooperation with your printer ahead of time to avoid unpleasing results.

 

 

Printers understand communication and design. Your printer should be able to provide you with the latest information, inspiration, technical advice, and innovative ideas for communicating your message through print, design and typography, signage, apparel, variable data printing and direct mail, integrated marketing and environmental responsible printing. They should also be able to work with you to solve any difficult prepress issues with your files. If they can’t, you have the wrong printer! The best advice, always, is to ASK YOUR PRINTER!

Call us at 828.684.4512. ImageSmith is a full-service print and marketing provider located in Arden, North Carolina. Contact us at ImageSmith for quotes on all your print and marketing projects, and more useful tips on how to create custom, effective, high impact marketing solutions.
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Share a Coke with Your Name on it: Getting Personal with VDP and Integrated Marketing

 

Update:

Personalized CokeAfter success in Australia, South Africa, the UK and dozens of other countries, Coke is finally releasing personalized Coke in the US this summer of 2014 – and it seems to be a social media hit (at least judging by my Facebook newsfeed.) 250 of the most popular names for millenials and teens will be found on 20 oz. bottles of Coke, Diet Coke and Zero. You can check online to see if your name will be on the bottles, and you can personalize virtual bottles to share via social media as well. But don’t get too creative – to avert potential viral disasters, the website will not generate any name not in their approved database! 😉
So why not get variable?

(The following article was first posted in 2013.)

Variable Data Packaging?
(Source link: www.marketingmagazine.co.uk)

Variable Data Printing is a proven catalyst in effective marketing – when properly executed, research indicates that response rates can be increased by as much as 30% with VDP. Now corporations are discovering creative new ways to combine personalized content with both online and print communications for a truly integrated marketing outreach. With the dominance of social media, consumers are beginning to expect (or in marketing-speak, “demand”) a personally targeted appeal from their advertisers. And who is more successful at branding and effective marketing than Coca-Cola?

But, VDP packaging? Well, in a way…. In Australia, and now the UK, Coke is putting out millions of bottles bearing, rather than their iconic logo, 150 names as a way to “personalize” their packaging. Coke enjoys such a universally established brand recognition that they can even remove their logo from their products and still count on consumer loyalty. The campaign is called “Share A Coke”, and as a truly integrated concept, it combines the product packaging with an online site where you can create a “virtual personalised Coke can” if you are unable to find the name you are looking for among the 150 choices. Outdoor ads, and social media also drive the campaign. The video below shares how Coke anticipated the buzz generation on Twitter to further build consumer interaction:

After a successful run in Australia, Coke is repeating the project in the UK. Now, a true VDP product packaging would require the Coke bottles to be printed with the customer’s name before rolling out of the vending machine – an expensive proposition – but the success of this semi-VDP approach highlights some important ideas:

  • the power of variable data personalization in affecting consumer choice,
  • an increasing consumer expectation that we can share a personal interaction with what was previously an unreachable corporate entity when it comes to our consumer purchasing power. The buzzword is “engagement,” and consumers are realizing their new role involves more than passive consumption, but can also include interaction and influence.
  • the value of finding ways to initiate the power and outreach of social media outlets like Twitter, Instagram and Facebook to your marketing advantage

 

Share a Coke campaign
Image Source: thisisnotadvertising.wordpress.com


 

Printers understand communication and design. Your printer should be able to provide you with the latest information, inspiration, technical advice, and innovative ideas for communicating your message through print, design and typography, signage, apparel, variable data printing and direct mail, integrated marketing and environmental responsible printing. If they can’t, you have the wrong printer! The best advice, always, is to ASK YOUR PRINTER!

Call us at 828.684.4512. ImageSmith is a full-service print and marketing provider located in Arden, North Carolina. Contact us at ImageSmith for quotes on all your print and marketing projects, and more useful tips on how to create custom, effective, high impact marketing solutions.