Electronics giant Sony turns to print marketing collateral to drive a “wow” factor. During the holiday season, it worked with its direct marketing agency, The Agency Inside Harte-Hanks, to create full-color inserts reminiscent of mini catalogs, which ran in newspapers across the country. The marketing pieces gave recipients information on where to buy the hottest Sony holiday gifts in
their local stores.
“We have gotten away from single-page or two-page inserts, and have been going for inserts more like mini-catalogs,” says Salvatore Lacorte, a consultant in commercial printing at Sony. “You want to get somebody’s attention with an insert. When it all falls out of the newspaper, we want ours to stick out.”
Innovative marketers routinely turned to online marketing to showcase their creativity in the last few years, but with the online noise volume reaching a feverish pitch, some have turned their attention back to print. Lucky for them, the production and printing industry has furiously been experimenting with new technologies in order to catch up with their digital-minded peers whom have stolen all the marketing glitz and kudos in recent years.
Sony takes advantage of new innovations in print to personalize and locally target such print campaigns, while also employing digital printing. While the company continues to use a lot of offset printing, it does more inline printing and variable data rate printing. This approach allows them to swap out text and image data to segment the creative.
“Digital printing is becoming more important as postal prices increase,” says Lacorte. “We want to speak directly to the customer, and variable data and inline printing allow us to do this better and helps increase sales. It is going to be even better with new four-color imaging that is coming this year.”
Continues at: Print stages a comeback – Direct Marketing News.
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