PODi Reveals Winners of the Best Practices Awards for Digital Printing Case Studies

ROCHESTER, NY—May 4, 2015—PODi, the Digital Printing Initiative, has announced the 2015 winners of the PODi Best Practices Awards for digital printing case studies. These prestigious awards recognize outstanding examples of direct marketing campaigns and collateral management solutions featuring the power and versatility of digital print. The winners will receive their awards at the annual AppForum digital printing and direct marketing conference, May 11-13, at Harrah’s in Las Vegas. AppForum attendees will have the opportunity to speak with award winners and attend sessions led by two of them.

PODi accepts case studies for the Best Practices Award competition throughout the year, and entries are judged on a combination of criteria, including pre-defined goals and measured results, value proposition, increased effectiveness, improved output and process, relevance, and innovation.

Best Practices Winner: Direct Marketing Category
Gannett Co., Inc., BlueSky ETO and InnerWorkings – "Gannett's Subscriber Program Achieves Reduced Cycle Times and Savings"

Gannett Consumer Sales and Services handles production and circulation of subscriber letters for more than 80 Gannett newspapers. The letters that are sent to subscribers have a great deal of local data that changes often. Every aspect of the customer communication is variable, driven by their specific subscription, length of subscription, and local events. With this complexity and large quantities, Gannett wanted to find a way to enhance its process.  Gannett and its partner, InnerWorkings, worked with BlueSky ETO for a custom solution. With the new communications program the mailings are processed, qualified, printed, and mailed in just three days.  Time needed to manage weekly mailings fell by 80 percent, and monthly administrative time fell from 40 hours to eight.

"We are thrilled to be recognized for this prestigious PODi Best Practices award! There is nothing more rewarding then developing Gannett’s 'big idea' and bringing that idea to life," said Carl Steinmann, vice president development for InnerWorkings. "We are super excited to collaborate with BlueSky ETO on new possibilities that embrace smart technology."

Best Practices Winner: Collateral Management Category
Mondelez International, The Food Group and The Standard Group—"Mondelez International On Demand Sales Portal"

Best Practices Winner: Collateral Management Category—Mondelez International, The Food Group and The Standard Group.

Mondelez International is one of the world’s largest snack companies with billion-dollar brands such as Oreo, LU and Nabisco biscuits; Cadbury, Cadbury Dairy Milk and Milka chocolate; Trident gum; Jacobs coffee and Tang powdered beverages. The Mondelez sales team needs marketing and sales materials in a timely manner. Materials need to be customized and personalized with distributor codes and information for specific customers. The project began with a strong collaboration between Mondelez, their agency, The Food Group, and The Standard Group.  A new print-on-demand and sales support portal was designed from the ground up.

"The Standard Group is proud to have developed a solution to increase utilization by 1,700 percent and to provide excellent support for the sales and marketing team at Mondelez," said Thanh Nguyen, CMO, The Standard Group. "Our goal was to make heroes of our customer and to give them the tools and insight to manage their marketing collateral and communication, to increase their brand consistency and to gain greater cost savings. Nothing is better to us than another satisfied customer."

Best Practices Winner: Self-Promotion Category
Gilson Graphics—"Gilson Graphics Increases Booth Traffic and Response Rates"

Gilson Graphics wanted to increase awareness of their position as a complete marketing solutions firm amongst big-name retail clients across the nation. They created a full-scale marketing campaign to demonstrate their capabilities and increase booth traffic at the 2014 GlobalShop trade show, the world's largest annual trade show and conference dedicated to store design, visual merchandising, and shopper marketing. Gilson knew that it would be difficult to break through the clutter and let their comprehensive brand story be heard. To overcome this challenge, Gilson set out to grab show attendees’ hard-earned attention with an integrated campaign that included multiple pre-show direct mail touch points, and a show-stopping 20’ long sandwich that inspired a dialog with attendees about Gilson’s many integrated marketing "ingredients." The campaign achieved a 5.7 percent response rate on the direct mail campaign, of which 70 percent were identified as "hot" or "warm" leads. Gilson Graphics acquired 4 new major national retail clients as a result of this campaign.

Kim Hasenbank, marketing manager for Gilson Graphics, added, "For more than a decade, Gilson Graphics has grown through acquisition from a traditional commercial printing company to an integrated marketing communications firm. We had known for a while that we needed to reintroduce ourselves to the marketplace, but for years it was the ‘cobbler's children have no shoes’ mentality: we would create full campaigns for clients, from creative concept all the way through production, but we never took the time to do the same for ourselves."

She continued, "By launching a full-scale, multi-touch marketing campaign to our prospect base, we were able to not only actively demonstrate our full-service capabilities, but also explain the depth and breadth of our service offering through the use of the ‘sandwich ingredient’ metaphor. It was playful, unassuming, and as a result, our prospects were eager to engage with us—which opened the door for our sales team to begin meaningful conversations with them about their needs. Using our digital printing capabilities coupled with our in-house creative, design and technology departments really helped set us apart in the highly competitive marketing solutions arena."

AppForum attendees will be able to attend sessions led by the award winning companies.

• Gannett Publishing Subscription Marketing Case Study—led by Bill Nicholson, vice president technology solutions, BlueSky ETO; Luke Teboul, vice president and general manager, BlueSky ETO; Carl Steinmann, vice president of business development, InnerWorkings;  and Debra Maizus, operations director, Innerworkings
• Developing and Planning an Online Marketing Portal—led by Calvin Grucelski, digital solutions manager, The Standard Group

It is not too late to register for the AppForum conference. Register using code AF15_Press50 to get half off the conference price. Visit www.appforum.org for more details on the conference. The 2015 AppForum Digital Printing Conference will occur May 11-13, at Harrah’s in Las Vegas.

About the AppForum
The annual AppForum is the only digital printing conference dedicated exclusively to marketing applications powered by digital print with a truly independent, vendor-neutral, unbiased agenda. All of PODi’s extensive research, resources, industry contacts, and expertise come together once a year to make the AppForum the cornerstone of what’s new and what’s next in digital print applications.

About PODi
PODi is a global, vendor neutral industry initiative with hundreds of printing industry members. It drives demand for marketing, print-on-demand and packaging applications powered by digital print, promotes understanding and adoption of efficient production workflows, and helps members build successful print-related businesses. It achieves this through Webinars, blog articles, innovative sales training techniques, an annual AppForum thought leadership conference, and an evergreen library of over 500 worldwide digital printing and marketing case studies, research reports, and workflow product briefings.

About Caslon
Caslon helps companies leverage digital media and technologies, especially relevant direct mail and digital printing. Caslon generates industry research, creates content, tools, and business resources for solutions providers including the Zenarate sales enablement system. Caslon is the management company of PODi and produces the annual PODi AppForum.

Souce: Podi.