Print Ad Builder

Here at Balihoo, we work with several clients whose local advertising strategies are heavily print-focused.  When deploying our solution for a new client, Balihoo's crack design team goes to great lengths to ensure that our print ad builder incorporates the appropriate fonts for the brand we're servicing.  Though this process can be laborious, it speaks to the core of our offering as a business; fonts are a critical brand component, one that sets the tone for a company's local advertising efforts.

It's no accident that we choose Cambria for business reports and Lucida Calligraphy for Christmas cards.  Like any creative element, fonts provide context for our messages; they give your written voice the timbre that readers "hear" as they process your message.  Bold, blocky letters sound aggressive; round, uneven letters sound youthful; ornate, elongated letters sound luxurious. 

Think of your font as the theme song in the background of your opening scene print ad.

Given this importance, you can imagine my dismay when a prior blog post was somehow published in a clunky, disagreeable Calibri.  I personally prefer a more subtle Arial, but would settle for a classic Times New Roman.  When limited patience and knowledge of the blog platform prevented me from quickly making a change, I lost sight of my goal and broke the cardinal rule of messaging: I shrugged my shoulders and sent it into the world, knowing it didn't quite reflect what I hoped to communicate.

The devil is in the details, and this is overwhelmingly true for a local advertiser.  Your words inherently invite scrutiny - not just what they say, but when, where, why, and how they're said.  For a franchise organization seeking national consistency, a state-of-the-art print ad builder ensures that every detail is communicated exactly as you intend. 

Your font is one subtle detail of many that create and preserve your brand.  Balihoo's ad builder software and professional support ensure that the message delivered is the message intended. 

Don't let your Courier degrade into Wingdings.  Contact us for a consultation.

Love them or hate them, the Paris Hiltons of reality TV - famous for having a famous name - can teach us something about branding. Sure, they are clogging our news racks and cable networks with their ridiculous drama, but we must give them credit for staying top-of-mind and creating a recognizable brand. And when I say "brand," I mean face. For these celebrities in the business of being famous, their faces are their brand identity.

Advertising Age commented on how the E! network created stars from scratch with "Keeping Up With The Kardashians" in a February story: "E!'s highest-rated show in network history attracted 4 million viewers a week in its fourth season. It also banked $18.4 million in measured-ad spending during the first 11 months of 2009."

For many of the dental surgeons for whom we plan local advertising and perform local media buying, their name is their brand. Some dental clinicians feel uncomfortable with putting their own face on an advertisement, which is understandable. But they need to build brand awareness with some sort of consistency, like their logo and tag line.

Few dental clinicians who use our local advertising services understand the importance of branding in their media campaigns. They want to run advertisements that make the phone ring. Again, understandable. However, if we can learn anything from the Kardashians, it's that branding efforts provide the long-term benefits of name-awareness where lead gen can be short-sighted.

(Nobel Biocare taps into our local marketing automation software to provide a co-op advertising solution for their partner clinicians. Using our print ad builder, these clinicians tag their advertisements with their photos, logo and customize the messaging.)

Last year we attended our first IFA Convention without an idea of really what to expect.  We were still fairly new into the market with our franchise marketing software and were still trying to explain exactly what Local Marketing Automation was. 

I've been to a lot of tradeshows in my day, but I have to say that the IFA show was probably in the top-3 I've ever attended.  The biggest difference I found was the engagement-level of the attendees.  The show floor was incredibly active with franchisors of all sizes actively looking for solutions.  In my industry in particular, I was surprised by the amount of companies looking for ad builder software - particularly a print ad builder.  Social media marketing was also a hot topic. 

This year, we expect the show to be better than ever.  It starts Feb 5 in San Antonio and we're looking forward to it!  Are you going to be there?  Let's catch up at the show, find us in booth # 627.

Premature optimization is a topic that most software developers have heard about, but I've recently been thinking about how applicable it is to other disciplines.  I'm not going to try and explain the connection to your line of work - as a practitioner in your own field you are best suited to do that yourself.  I'll just toss a few words at you to get you thinking about it.

A long time ago (in computer industry years) Donald Knuth warned that "premature optimization is the root of all evil".  Software optimization is the process of modifying a software system to make some aspect of it work more efficiently or use fewer resources.  Some lazy programmers use this statement as their maxim to justify writing slow, resource hogging code that never gets improved until someone else does it for them (usually after they have moved on to another project or company).  They entirely missed (or ignored) the point.

Optimization itself is not evil - doing it too early is what gets us in trouble.  If you haven't yet proven the relevance, usefulness, correctness or marketability of your application - you should be developing it in prototype mode until those things have been confirmed.  Most people would be surprised at how much code gets tossed out or at least heavily refactored as a product matures.  The first iteration is always a prototype, wether you are willing to admit that or not.  If your software team isn't tossing out code then I guaruntee that you have a lot of nasty legacy code and your product is evolving about as slowly as a fossil.

I used to work for a guy that was so hung up on performance and memory optimization that he was willing to sacrifice correctness and maintainability in order to eek out a couple more milliseconds and bytes of savings.  I don't think he conciously decided that those extra tidbits were worth messing up one thousandth of a penny in a treasury bond pricing model (which is a big deal when your talking about many large transactions).  He was just so focused on performance that everything else (correctness, maintainability, time to market) became secondary.  He was too proud of his code's performance to see the obvious flaws.
Franchise Marketing - Channel marketing software - Local internet Marketing
This principle is magnified at a startup.  You don't have the time, human resources or capital to try and perfect a product or feature that has never been tested in the market.  You have to learn to identify "good enough (for now)".  You have to get it in front of real users who really use it - or at least figure out why they refuse to us it.  For example, our print ad builder has been through countless iterations.  The first version wasn't too pretty, fast, or even very well thought through.  The fact that it kicks the tail of every other local marketing platform out there is because we were willing to admit that we wouldn't get it right the first time.  We have relentlessly refactored and modified it.

Think about how this principle applies to you and feel free to shoot me some comments (especially if you disagree with me on any of my points).

If you have a franchise marketing solution or run a co-op advertising program, chances are that you also use some sort of ad builder software to manage the customization of your creative assets for local advertising and marketing. 

Is your ad builder software as effective as it should be?  Here are 4 questions to ask yourself and your business to evaluate your ad builder software:

1. What is your adoption rate?  That is, of your affiliates, what percentage have accessed and used the ad builder software in the last 3 months?  If it's less than 50%, you have a fundamental problem. 

2.  How many mediums does your software address?  If you just have a print ad builder solution, you're leaving your affiliates on their own to manage other mediums, which significantly decreases the likelihood they'll use your one-medium solution.  Push for a cross-medium solution. 

3.  Is it easy to use?  This is a bit objective, but there's a simple litmus test here.  Grab a co-worker, friend, spouse or anyone who is not a marketing professional and ask them to use the tool to customize an ad or in-store piece.  If it takes them more than 5 minutes from start to finish, you need to work on the usability of your solution.

4. Is it ONLY ad builder software?  Or, are using the opportunity to help your affiliates be successful locally by providing a true local store marketing solution?  Providing just a simple tool is not the answer, you need to deliver end-to-end development and implementation of local marketing ideas.  Also, it's critical that you deliver local marketing strategy to help the affiliates be successful.  Marketing software tools are valuable, but without the applied local marketing strategy, they are useless. 

Certainly this list is not comprehensive.  However, I strongly believe that if you answer these questions honestly, and modify your program based on the answers, you'll end up with a solution that is more effective for both you and your affiliates. 

I spent part of today putting some slides together around our print ad builder functionality and I thought it would make sense to share some of my thoughts here. 

Although our ad builder software works across all mediums, many of the customers we work with come to us with a need for a print ad builder. 

The below is a basic example of our print ad builder in action.  In this example, the manufacturer (in this case Columbia) is allowing the retailer to change a fairly wide variety of variables for this specific ad.  The interesting thing here is that the manufacturer can drive a fullly brand-compliant ad to the local retailer that they can customize for their needs.  When the reseller selects the product they want to promote, the headline, background, product details and copy all automatically generate.  Plus, the retailers logo and contact information is automatically inserted.  This makes it quick and easy for the local reseller to put together marketing materials to support any given product.   

To take this to another level, the manufacturer could even intetgrate their co-op advertising program into this print ad builder.  For example, the above template could be co-opped at 50% for the local reseller.  However, a second template that gives more real estate to the local reseller could be co-opped at 25%.  This gives the local reseller the flexibility to promote the products they feel are most applicable to their market, however they are incented by the manufacturer at a varying level based on the product focus. 

As a national brand, as you look to implement a print ad builder, make sure you consider how template flexibility impacts your overall local marketing solution. 

Sales promotion marketing, using co-op advertising funds, has typically been a very promotional-based type activity.  The brand builds the ad, in which the retailer plays a minor role, then a print ad builder is used to customize it for the retailer. 

However, as suggested by this Ad Age article, Walmart is taking a unique spin on these ads.  They're focused more on the product itself, with the retailer taking the back seat in terms of visibility.  It suggests that because Walmart has established a positioning of low-price leader, they're able to run these more brand-based (or product based) ads without the need for a heave dose of sales promotion marketing messaging. 

While interesting in and of itself as a general trend, I think it's important for product manufacturers to consider how this could play out in their co-op advertising programs.  Specifically, manufacturers need to consider the role their creative and creative templates play given this information.

Our recommendation to clients of our co-op marketing solution is that they need to develop creative templates that allow for a spectrum.  At a very basic level you can create two versions of your product ad - one where the retailer plays a starring role and one where the retailer plays a minor role.  Then, fund these templates at different levels (for example, 25% co-op for one version and 50% co-op for the other).  Approaching it in this fashion allows the retailer to implement their sales promotion marketing efforts in the manner the best suits them and they're rebated at a level that is comfortable to the product manufacturer. 

Of course, this approach assumes that you have a print ad builder (or other mediums) implemented in your co-op advertising program that can manage this level of specificity.  Balihoo's channel marketing software can handle that, I hope yours can too.   

 

Tags:  Channel Marketing Software, Co-op Advertising, Co-op Marketing Software, Co-op Marketing Solution, CRM Marketing Automation, Retail Marketing, Sales Promotion Marketing, Trade Promotion Marketing

Happy to report that we made some good progress with updating many of our materials this month. We've recently moved to a new logo and slightly different color scheme and that was the impetus for the revise, but it's great to dig into all your old collateral and realize how much your strategy and thinking has changed since the last revision. Some of the key updates we've made over the last week include:

• New flash demo of our Local Marketing Automation solution
• New Balihoo Datasheet
• New web content addressing the medium-specifics component of our solution:
  • Direct Mail Ad Builder Software
  • POP/In-store materials solution
  • Print Ad Builder
  • Television Ad Builder Software
  • Radio Ad Builder
  • Online Display Ad Builder
  • Search Pay Per Click solution
  • Email Marketing solution

It's an exciting time here at Balihoo and we continue to develop materials that help to explain the value we're delivering to current and future clients. Would love to hear any thoughts you have on any of these materials!