How Automation Makes Print Production Successful

Print is not dead! In a world where the flood of ephemeral online ads is quickly seen and forgotten just as fast, the humble printed catalog or flyer can have a long-lasting effect on the consumer. This is not just a matter of personal preference. A report in Scientific American recently concluded that “reading on paper still boasts unique advantages” over screens.

Suppose a printed catalog is well designed and produced. In that case, it is far more likely to remain on a table or counter, a reminder of the retailer’s brand and an open invitation to browse calmly at one’s leisure. The same cannot be said of an online or email ad, which is swiped aside forever in an instant by the next frantic, on-screen interruption. As publishing pioneer John W. Seybold once said:

“Print speaks to us, quietly and patiently.”

Production depends on various data sources

Catalogs and brochures depend on the correct functioning of some systems and data sources during production, which makes the process prone to errors. Each one is described by a whole table of data. The data include (but are not limited to) the following information on each product:

Of course, not all these data points will make it into a catalog or flyer, but many will. The others are all relevant to planning every campaign – AND they are typically scattered across many separate databases. If you multiply all those data points by the sheer volume of individual products advertised, then you’ll get an inkling of the formidable challenges every marketing production manager faces.

Each printed marketing piece includes an array of products selected by the marketing team for their importance to the company’s bottom line. Item pricing strategies offer specials on desirable but price-sensitive items while charging normal prices on other products to make up the difference. Campaigns differ by geographic region and demographics, meaning that each printed piece must have multiple versions. Print versioning makes it even more critical to have a production process that reliably maintains a solid connection to all data sources during the design process.

Automation offers enormous advantages
With so many time-consuming variables, and so many chances to make costly errors, the only solution is to automate the process. As Home Depot, Lowe’s, and other large retailers have learned, there are enormous benefits to automating the print and media marketing process:

• Greatly reduced user intervention at each step in the process, accelerating time-to-market and targeted volume of marketing campaigns
• Greater and more efficient collaboration among siloed departments within a large organization
• Sustained cost savings, among other things due to less cost-intensive error sources through automated correction cycles
• Greater return on marketing campaigns that can be targeted and measured with greater accuracy

Automation applies to everything, from planning the marketing campaign to producing well-designed printed pieces and their umpteen versions. Only by automating the tedious, repetitive tasks can a production team find time to design. Moreover, once tasks become streamlined, other departments are freed to pursue nonroutine tasks, such as SEO strategy and mobile development. Only with a single, controlled chain of events can a marketing production manager and peers survive, and even thrive, in this ever-changing, data-driven world. Here’s how it plays out:

Start with the planning stage. Single product and product line marketing teams spend their time visualizing the next campaign and turning it into practical steps. The goal is to produce an attractive campaign, and track its progress and improve future marketing efforts. Even though they know their products intimately, something is always changing. For example:

• A new version of the product may be imminent.
• The product’s availability, price, or margin may have changed.
• The product’s photos or descriptions may have changed.
• A supply chain problem may affect delivery for some stores.
• A specific color or size may no longer be available.

These and a hundred other changes may affect which products to feature prominently, if at all. However, marketing teams need access to data in real-time and in one place to make the best possible decision.

Visualizing the printed piece is the next step. Using a web-based whiteboarding environment, LAGO also gives marketers the ability to place high-value products where they belong in a catalog or brochure. For any selected product, all the related data is connected. When the marketing team hands the project off to designers, each product “block” automatically connects to the current product data, images, and any other information the designer may need.

Designing and producing the printed piece is equally automated. The designer receives an InDesign template file, automatically including all the marketing team’s decisions. Thanks to a LAGO plugin for Adobe InDesign, the designer is free to do what they do best – create a memorable design concept – without having to hunt down all the related data from various PIM, DAM, and other databases. If any data elements change during the design process, like an updated product image, the layout is updated in real-time until the piece is sent to be printed. For example, if a regional or demographic version is called for, the system maintains all the common elements while allowing the designer to customize the new version.

Review and approval can be a tedious, largely manual process. Fortunately, LAGO also provides a real-time, bi-directional, and auditable process for marketing teams and designers to identify errors, communicate changes, and verify the final layout before printing.

That’s not the end. LAGO is still at work once the catalog or flyer and multiple versions have gone to print. The data for that particular campaign can be automatically exported to online and mobile advertising channels. Also, since the data for each advertised product is automatically tracked, the marketing team can gauge the success of each component to help them plan the next iteration.

The Smell of Success

Automated, integrated, and multichannel campaigns have enormous potential, not just to relieve the burden placed on marketing production managers. They can also increase profitability exponentially. Printed materials play a vital role in that success. In a New York Times article on the resurgence of catalogs, retail strategist Bruce Cohen remarked, “It’s a pronouncement in favor of what all retailers are recognizing – that there are moments when people want to slow down, and there’s still an important place for the catalog.”

Print is not dead. It is alive and effective. Thanks to automation tools like LAGO, that prediction is now a cost-effective reality in a data-driven world.

Covid plus the supply chain crisis has put retailers on the ropes. But agile marketing departments and their creative directors, however, have already taken on the challenges of commerce. One of the most important roles in modern retail marketing is played by data – specifically, the data in the digital asset management (DAM) system.

The DAM challenge

These database systems are nothing new in Retail Marketing. DAM has been around for thirty years. However, early systems were complicated and were usually stored on local network servers. Present-day, most DAM systems reside in the cloud or are heading there but pose no fewer challenges for the creative directors. Here are some of the obvious challenges:

• Consistent Usage – According to a McKinsey report, 19 percent of users still spend their working time searching for and collating data! The savings potential through the integration of a good DAM system is very large but is crucially conditioned by consistent keywording of images. This potential can therefore only be fully exploited through consistent use of the DAM by employees.
• Metadata Madness – The key to any database is its metadata – technical and content related image information. Metadata is the basis for making images findable in the DAM.
• Integration – To be efficient, a DAM system must work seamlessly with many other systems, from product information management (PIM) to marketing campaign planning and production. The fact is that most legacy DAM systems do not play well with other systems/applications.

The evolution of new marketing channels and the intense competition for people’s attention have worsened the situation. In a marketing campaign, a picture may be worth a thousand words. However, getting the right version of the right picture, at the right instant in time, and for the right channel is a major challenge. Traditional DAMs cannot do it alone. A DAM must be much more than a filing system and must be consistently integrated into the IT system landscape.

The ever-growing multichannel world dictates that digital assets must be accessible in real-time – all the time. As a result, accurate and dynamic data are more critical than ever. So, having all your assets in one place – and easily accessible to every person and marketing-related system – is vital.

As a recent article in MarTech put it, “Digital asset management can play a vital role in your marketing organisation, unifying online and offline marketing channels and leading to more efficient marketing resource allocation.”

But not all DAMs are the same

Many DAMs exist in a world of their own, designed to meet the needs of one channel or workflow. Traditional DAMs are cumbersome in the extreme when used for other purposes or channels. They are also not always easily accessible across departments or regions. An InDesign user creating a print or online campaign, for example, may have to exit their design software in order to hunt through a DAM manually to find the photo or description of a promoted product. Hoping that they see the most recent version, they then download the file, thereby creating a duplicate and placing it in the layout.

Multiply that scenario by the number of regional variations in a campaign – and the number of media channels involved – and you get a cumbersome process, slow to market and highly subject to human error. It’s every creative director’s nightmare to discover – too late – that a catalog or brochure error caused the company thousands of dollars.

The LAGO DAM solution

But there is a DAM system designed for today’s multichannel marketing world. Comosoft’s LAGO DAM allows marketing departments to consolidate digital asset management into a single, unified repository – distributing assets to team members across the enterprise through a centralised platform.

LAGO’s automation and integration with other product databases assure that the correct version of the asset for a particular channel will be found immediately. In addition, if a new version of the asset is created, it can be automatically updated throughout the campaign.

Creative designers, photographers, and art directors especially benefit from using the LAGO DAM through an Adobe InDesign layout plugin. Allowing the DAM to manage assets in the background automatically will enable them to focus on what they do best – design and collaborate – rather than waste time searching for the right image.

Category- and product managers also benefit greatly from using the LAGO DAM system. Comosoft is highly adept at integrating DAM, PIM, and other critical databases with its expert planning tools, so that each campaign can use just the right products to feature – even if there are multiple regional variations to consider. Furthermore, the marketing manager’s decisions are automatically conveyed to the InDesign user, including product size, type, color, pricing, regional variations, and the myriad of other details that used to make campaign planning so difficult.

Once a campaign is in motion, LAGO data can be automatically exported to websites, mobile apps, or other digital channels – eliminating the manual process that traditional, channel-specific DAMs can impose..

Every creative marketing director understands the necessity and urgency of having a reliable DAM system – one that is integrated with every step in the marketing workflow. LAGO’s DAM solution grows and evolves with the company – and with the ever-changing, multichannel world.