Third Annual Users Group Conference Concludes to Rave Reviews

The third annual XMPie Users Group Conference, which took place last month in Las Vegas, drew a wide array of XMPie users from around the world interested in learning more about leveraging their XMPie investment, as well as the latest innovations in one-to-one communications. The conference kicked off with in-depth pre-conference tutorial sessions, which were attended by nearly 60 percent of attendees. The event also featured highly informative presentations and roundtables, covering everything from the latest XMPie technology and capabilities, to one-to-one campaign best practices and current and emerging trends in a line-up of design, programming and marketing-focused sessions.

The keynote presentation by Jeff Stewart, chief technology officer, Trekk Cross-Media, received high praise from attendees. Stewart discussed social networks as the next frontier in personalized marketing and pointed out how new and different technologies have historically been dismissed as irrelevant, yet have eventually made an enormous impact on society.

XMPie President Jacob Aizikowitz also addressed attendees with a forward-looking presentation about the key role creative excellence plays in successful campaigns and how XMPie’s technology and product philosophy enable highly creative variable data print and cross-media campaigns. One of Aizikowitz’s key messages focused on harnessing parallel processing and, eventually, cloud computing, allowing for dramatic speed gains in producing jobs’ output streams.

Rounding out the conference was the presentation of the XMPie Users Group “Best of the Best” awards. The interactive, cross-media campaigns were selected through peer voting at the conference’s evening reception.

For more information about the annual XMPie Users Group Conference or joining the XMPie Users Group, please visit www.xmpieusers.org.

Campaigns Honored as “Best of the Best” at Users Group Conference

Three innovative XMPie Users Group member companies were recognized as the “Best of the Best” at the third annual XMPie Users Group Conference. The XMPie Users Group “Best of the Best” awards were held to showcase groundbreaking campaigns produced by XMPie users across the globe. The winning campaigns were selected through peer voting at the conference’s evening reception.

First place recognition went to Denver-based Faction Media for a fully integrated and personalized lead-generation campaign for tw telecom Inc., a leading provider of managed voice and data networking solutions. The campaign, which targeted enterprise-based IT decision makers, spanned traditional and online media, leveraged Google Pay-Per-Click advertising and featured customized text inside a video feed.

Prindoz of Bad Doberan, Germany received second place for its AIDA Cruises cross-media campaign designed to reach 140 managers within a six-hour time frame. The project for AIDA, a cruise brand of Carnival Corporation & plc, needed to be completed in just four days and encompassed data management and the creation and deployment of personalized print, Web and video communications.

Third place acknowledgment went to Centrica of North Ryde, New South Wales, Australia for a campaign designed to build awareness of the company’s cross-media expertise and services among its current and prospective clients. Centrica’s ‘VIP Backstage Pass’ themed campaign included a printed mail piece, personalized Web site and response mechanism.

Of the campaigns, XMPie President Jacob Aizikowitz said, “The groundbreaking projects showcased leaves one with a clear sense of the major advancements made by XMPie users. Highly creative, multi-channel, conversational campaigns — including those with significant use of personalized images and video — are becoming wide spread within this community and it gives everyone at XMPie a sense of pride to provide the vision and technology that drives our users’ innovations.”

The XMPie “Best of the Best” competition takes place at the annual Users Group Conference and is open to all XMPie Users Group members.

Tech Tip: Changing symbols or penny amounts to superscript

The following tip may look familiar to those that attended the Design Sessions at the recent XMPie Users Group Conference, but this exceptional Adobe InDesign CS4 tip is too good to not share with everyone! Adobe has added a new feature to Paragraph styles — GREP Style. GREP is an advanced, pattern-based search technique and you can use GREP styles to apply a character style to text that matches the GREP expression you specify.

There are many uses for this new feature, however for this example, we want to format both a registered trademark symbol and a currency cent amount as superscript.

1) Create a new character style (or two) that defines the font’s position as superscript. No need to assign other attributes unless desired.

For example, if you use different fonts for various paragraphs or fonts where the registered symbol is already in superscript format, you could have more control over the look by changing the font and/or font size. In this example, there is a “pennies” character style, where superscript is applied and the baseline shift is adjusted to give the text an even appearance.

2) Next in your Paragraph Style setup, select GREP Style. Click New GREP Style. In the Apply Style (first drop down) select the character style you desire. The To Text box is where you place the GREP expression.

To search for registered symbols you could copy and paste the character itself (®) or use the coding for this symbol ~r. Both methods work. To search for pennies in dollar amounts, type in \.\d\d. This means look for a period with any two digits after it.

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3) When you are finished you can apply your paragraph styles as desired.

To learn more about GREP Styles or see a video visit Adobe help or follow this link: http://help.adobe.com/en_US/InDesign/6.0/WS6F1E524C-8F74-4331-A813-33D08F983E94.html

More… If you have text coming in from a database that uses a set of characters to define copyrights, registered and trademark symbols and not the symbol’s character itself (for example, (c) (r) or (tm) ). You can use the QLingo function FindAndReplace() to convert the set of characters to their actual text symbols. For example, the expression below was used to replace any of three sets mentioned. FindAndReplace( FindAndReplace( FindAndReplace(|->[Text], "(c)", "©"), "(tm)", "™"), "(r)", "®")

Customer Spotlight

Faction Media of Denver recently combined its PersonalEffect software with a dash of technology humor to create an award-winning, interactive campaign for tw telecom Inc., a leading provider of managed voice and data networking solutions. The campaign was designed to generate and retain high-value leads and customers and targeted enterprise telecom and network services decision makers.

The tongue-in-cheek campaign kicked off with a personalized e-mail message featuring a customized image that mimics an instant message conversation between recipients and their computers. The conversation focused on how an unreliable internet connection was inhibiting their relationship and directed recipients to Google their names to find out how the relationship could be mended.

The search portion of the campaign leveraged Google Pay-Per-Click advertising, so when recipients completed the name search, a sponsored link featuring his/her name and a personalized message from tw telecom would appear at the top of the search results. The link brought recipients to a personalized micro-site, featuring a humorous variable data video showing the recipient’s computer at a therapy session discussing the relationship issues that would later be resolved with the help of tw telecom.

For recipients that did not respond to the initial e-mail message, a personalized direct mail piece with a Post-It note inside, reinforced the e-mail message, prompting and enticing the non-responders to Google their names.

The campaign, which received first place recognition at the XMPie Users Group Best of the Best awards, exceeded tw telecom’s expectations by generating a unique brand experience and driving an impressive seven percent meet rate that ultimately resulted in substantial revenue from annualized service contracts.

To hear more about the award-winning campaign directly from the source, stay tuned to the XMPie Web site for a podcast with Dave Greves, founder and account strategist, Faction Media.