Complex, but not complicated!
Personalized advertising media with the priint:suite
There is currently a steady trend towards personalized advertising media. Through the individualization of offers in mailings, catalogs and in the entire marketing mix, the customer is addressed in a more targeted manner and the response rate is thus considerably increased. Print channels in a marketing mix dominated by digital channels can therefore guarantee the overall success of a marketing campaign.
We believe in this trend. Hence we are currently working on solutions that enable fully personalized advertising media with individual layouts and individual content in large quantities, but each with a circulation of 1. The possible applications are very diverse.
Imagine, for example, that on the basis of existing customer information and the ordering behavior of an online shop customer, the recommendation engine connected to the online shop forwards a product recommendation list to the priint:suite and generates a highly individualized product flyer on it and makes it available as a PDF to a digital printer. Or think of a mailing that is associated with a voucher campaign. Each mailing is personalized and equipped with highly individual content (text + image) and an individual voucher. The customer data comes from a CRM system, the content used from a PIM system and the image data from a DAM.
You may ask how can personalized print advertising be realized with the priint:suite?
The priint:suite has the technical capability to automate layouts. This is without doubt one of the proven strengths of the priint:suite and has proven it in many projects with complex tables and layout rules. However, this alone is not sufficient for personalized advertising media on a large scale, but should rather be regarded as a necessary condition.
Two further important factors remain:
Content: A “Content First” strategy is the basis for all those companies that prefer digital channels in their marketing mix and want to “play on” them. Without Content First, any Digital First strategy will fail. Dynamic, highly individualized print advertising media are subject to the same digital rules.
Performance: Individualized advertising media (edition 1) in large quantities make new demands on the rendering engine used. Why is this so?
The calculation is quite simple: when developing such high-performance systems, we are currently calculating, for example, 250,000.00 individual mailings for a campaign. If the generation time for a mailing is now estimated at 5 seconds, this does not appear to be slow at first. However, if you calculate the total run time of just under 15 days, it quickly becomes clear that we need more powerful systems. In addition to many influencing factors, this particularly affects the generation speed itself and scalability, i.e. the simultaneous parallel generation of layouts. A generation time of 3 seconds per layout and simultaneous generation of 20 layouts (20 rendering instances) results in a total runtime of almost 11 hours – a much better overall picture.
Print and publishing are part of digital communication. Print and publishing are taking on a new meaning in digital communication, but according to the rules of the digital game.
The good old print industry as we know it today will have a hard time in the future.
We are working on the future of a new print industry because Print must reinvent itself!
For us, this is not just a sentence, but a mission.