Posts filed under 'Printing Intelligence'
Source: Appleton Papers
There is no question that online communicaiton has changed the way the world interacts, stays informed, and purchases products. But experience has shown us that choosing print or online tactics isn’t an “either or” proposition. In fact, online and print, when used in a coordinated campaign, enhance the delivery of the messages and increase marketing results:
> 2 Times: consumers receiving a printed catalog are twice as likely to buy online than those consumers who do not receive a catalog.
> 67%: of online action is driven by offline messages.
> 86%: shopping is easier when they have a printed catalog.
Things change. Media evolves. Technologies improve. But the need to engage consumers remains the same. Having a clear, integrated strategy that uses both print and online increases your success rate. The message is clear, print ignites online action.
July 20th, 2009
Source: PIA: The Magazine, May 2009
Source: John Leininger, Professor, Department of Graphic Communications, Clemson University
You do not have to be involved with variable-data printint (VDP) for very long to hear someone tell you about the importance of data, but it goes much further than just starting with good data.
It has to be relevant and inserted strategically. The critical element of data management that separates success from failure in a printed piece is more than just cleaning up the data. It has to do with enhancing the data, selecting relevant information that will created a desired action or response. Going one step further, it deals with linking the data from one source to another source. I do not mean to minimize the importance of properly cleansing and preparing the data. You are wasting your money if the mail piece never gets delivered because of an incorrect address, but what is going to be covered here is preparing an effective message that is based on compiled relevant data personalized for the individual.
Cleansing Data
We did a recent test with a variable-data research experiment for an alumni mailing. We received the ready-to-use list from the campus data service department. They informed us the list had been run through the National Change of Address (NCOA) registry. There were 8,770 records, and 1,000 records failed the NCOA process. This seemed high at about 11%. The USPS expects a typical NCOA pass-through to drop about 5.51% of the records.
Next we ran the list through a commecial postal software program to CASS (Coding Accuracy Support System) certify and DPV (Delivery Point Validation) the data to properly format and check for a valid address and then through the NCOA registry; we recovered 850 of the 1,000 names USPS claimed failed NCOA. In this same process there were 200 addresses from the “good” addresses of their sort that failed NCOA in our sort. Why? When you do an NCOA cleanse, you have a chance to decide how strict you want to be on any questionable address - we keep it at the highest threshold but USPS may have been accepting a questionable address. The 850 names were recovered because NCOA makes a comparison to the actual address. If one or two things are different (say an abbreviation or the North/East/West/South direction is not correct) it will fail the NCOA comparison. That is why you always want to CASS and DPV the list first. This process standardizes the address format (and in some cases corrects the address) so a match when running it through the NCOA registry is more likely. It takes a bit longer, but it makes a difference as is evident from this single example.
Maximize Your Data
So what do you do to get the most out of your data? The first place to focus is where the data came from. The Direct Marketing Association in their 2008 Statistical Fact Book, 30th Edition, states the average overall response rate from using an outside list is 4.9%, and when using an internal list is 11.8%. Keep in mind this is an average. If you do a great job with your direct mail piece, it can be higher - a poor job will be lower for either list. But using this as a ballpark number, the data is telling you the internal list of customers will yield better results than an outside list of customers.
Customers constantly say they do not have good data. But if they have 500 to 1,000 customers who have purchased their product you can take the list and send it to a commercial list company like USADATA, InfoUSA, Melissa Data or AccuData. These companies have compiled hundreds of background characteristics about people who live in our country through public information, including: Census data, motor vehicle registration cards, magazine subscriptions, telephone directories, and surveys. They will take the list of customers, append the original data with new information from their databas, and then analyze the names to determine what commonalities show up throughout the customer’s database. If you find that 55% of the people are male between the ages of twenty-eight and thirty-five, own their home, etc., you can ask for another 10,000 names of people with those exact same characteristics. If you use this type of list, even though it is considered an outside list, the responses will increase because you have focused on a group of people that appreciates your customer’s product. Once you have the profile, you can continue to use the report to locate similar people in a wider geographic area.
Response Rate
The overall average response rate mentioned earlier for outside and internal lists (4.9% and 11.8%) includes multiple contacts with the consumer (through direct mail, phone calls, emails, PURLs, personal visits, etc.). Unless you run some type of analytical setup, an outside list is just a general list of poeple who live in a certain area. Compare this percentage to direct mail where the DMA 2007 average response rate is 2.15% (this is only for contacting through direct mail and that is why it is lower than the overall average response rate). This 2.15% is a mythical number that customers consistently make comparisons to, and it means nothing if you cannot compare it to a relevant direct mail piece. It is an average, and the chances your customer’s mailing will be average is no better than it being above or below average.
Things are always changing in the world, and if you try to compare a variable-data printed piece to a static piece mailed twelve months ago, six months ago, or a month ago, it is not a fair comparison. The offer may be different, and the environment may have changed - gas prices, the economy, the weather, the political environment, and the cultural group to which the mailing is being sent. You should randomly pull out a group. if the total production run is 4,000 or more, 5% is an acceptable number to send a static piece to. The rest of the group gets the variable treatment. This way you can determine what would have happened without the variable data, and if there was a lift in the value of adding variable-data personalization you can prove that to your customer. Likewise, if you compare a group from a general outside list to a profiled list, while always maintaining a 5% static control group, you can show there is value in profiling your customer’s customers. The more you know about an individual, the more targeted you can make the promotional piece.
The Data
So, what if you do not know much about the person? To start, when you confirm their address you have access to many different things related to the address - most deal with the USPS encoding of the data and coding for mail delivery, but you can identify the country, the congressional district, and even the longitude/latitude of the house. Additionally, some mail processing programs allow you to identify the gender, parse out the address elements, and show the short or long city names. This means you can identify things like the community college they might attend, their senator or representative, and the distance from a store to their house. if you want to increase the value of the information that you can identify from someone’s address, you can upload the address to a list company and they can return up to 400 attributes for that individual record. Their business is to gather and track this information for business-to-consumer and business-to-business strategies. One such company is USADATA. One their website, http://www.usadata.com/consumer.html, they list several hundred data fields that can be analyzed; the major categories deal with households, homeowners, individual, special interests of the individual, automobiles, health, high-tech status, marketing segmentation, travel, wealth indicators, and live events.
Think of how you may be able to relate data from this service to existing data available on any subject. If you know when someone was born, got married, or graduated from college on a certain data, you can link that data to a list of events or facts from that year. If someone was born in 1956, they typically will pay attention to the list of facts from that year. Emotion or nostalgia may be the driving force, and people will read on if you tell them in 1956 the New York Giants won the NFL football championship, a gallon of gas cost 30 cents, the median household income was $4,780.00, Around the World in 80 Days was the best picture, etc. Or you could link information about the state where they were born into a database about the state flower, the state tree, the state bird, the state motto, etc. You can also collect data when they log into a Web page or respond to a PURL and then link the data to an existing database. If you find out, through a PURL, the name of the person’s favorite NASCAR driver, you can link all sorts of data about that driver and their team to the original database. This is done with the use of relational databases.
When you are ready to merge the data for a variable-data piece, all of this data is available through the links and any specific fields can be pulled out to create a flat, delimited database to be used in the variable-data application. You can have dozens of databases linked together to create a unique set of data you can bring up for a given individual based on their own history.
Success vs. Failure
What really separates the successes from the failures is knowing what data you want to use and how to reach the customer. You have to treate a twenty-five-year-old differently from a fifty-year-old. you have to start thinking in terms of strategic marketing tactics based on data you have gathered or know from a history on an individual or company. Printing has become more than putting ink or toner on paper. You need to work with a customer to analyze what you can do to help create a response from the marketing material you are producing for them.
There are so many great resources available for you to review. Strategic Database Marketing by Arthur M. Hughes can serve as the marketing bible for a company working with variable-data printing. He goes into philosophical discussions on how to manage and maximize the value of a database. He also provides a matrix dealing with the recency, frequency, and the monetary (he refers to this as RFM) analysis of customers’ purchasing history to identify the best customers to market at any given point of time. He offers a white paper on this topic RFM Migration Analysis - A New Approach to a Proven Technique, co-authored by Jim Sellars, on his Web page - http://dbmarketing.com/articles/Art123.htm. You will find other useful tools on his website and several downloadable files to work with. His book is a must-read if you are going to become a marketing service provider for the variable-data segment of our industry.
List Companies
The list companies are also great resources for material to help you view databases not as a tedious and difficult task but rather as a value-added service that can set you apart from your competition. AccuData is a strong list company, and they offer several white papers on marketing concepts to help you sell the service to your customer. The following white papers are available to download for free from http://www.accudata.com/White+Papers.26.lasso. All of these topics are relevant to almost everything you do when approaching a customer from a marketing perspective.
- Targeting Repeat Buyers: Building a High-Performance Customer File
- The Marketer’s Guide to Descriptive vs. Predictive Marketing
- 3 Ways to Improve Customer Care through Data Hygiene
- Quick Study: 85 Ways to Jump-Start Demand Generation
- 30 Questions to Jump-Start Your Business: A Guide to Expanding Your Marketing Services
- Generating Buyers, Not Leads: Best Practices for Finding High-Propensity Buyers
In Summary
You need to understand where you can locate data and how to merge it together with plans to bring it into a variable data application. Without planning a strategy for the marketing message to properly communicate with the customer, whether it is business-to-consumer or business-to-business, you will just end up with a marketing piece with average results. Tool up with new employees or train the existing employees to look past the mechanics of doing their job. It is not just what you have to work with, it is what you do with what you have. Success is not an accident; it takes a strategic plan and proper implementation of variable data.
June 23rd, 2009
Source: Deliver Magazine, May 2009
Author: Bruce Britt
Customized mailings help a New England car dealership nudge sales higher.
When customers walk into a Prime Motor Group auto dealership to check out its vehicles, they may not drive off with a new car - but they haven’t heard the last of the dealership’s pitch either.
Rather, as part of an aggressive follow-up campaign, Prime Motor dealerships get their messages back in front of customers within days, this time in the form of a cutting-edge and highly personalized mailing that is winning rave reviews for its immediacy and detail - and winning the dealership business with its savvy.
Indeed, at a time when many companies are slashing their marketing due to economic uncertainty, Prime Motor franchises are raising the ante on their direct mail investment. Along the way, the Massachusetts dealership group is proving that smart and consistent customer communications, not fewer, can offer businesses distinct advantages over competitors to maintain vigorous marketing efforts.
Dubbed the “Thank You for Visiting” campaign, the Prime Motor effort centers on a 5-1/2-by-8-inch postcard that the franchise mails to prospective customers within days of their visit to one of the import dealership’s showrooms or its Web site. Made of heavy, high-gloss stock, the card naturally features the prospect’s name, a minimum for customized mailings. But in an even deeper dive into the personalization pool, the card also provides the names, contact information and photos of the specific salesperson who pitched the prospect and of the sales manager who assisted. Further, the card includes a photo of the exact model, color included, that the mail recipient test drove (or showed interest in online) and a savings coupon for that particular auto.
The card bears a message from a Prime Motor Group general manager: “Thank you for your recent visit to our auto dealership. I hope you found your sales consultant to be helpful and informative. I want you to know that we are committed to providing you with a buying and ownership experience truly ‘like no other.’” The message concludes with direct contact info and an invitation for the customer to call or e-mail with any questions, comments or suggestions.
When the franchise implemented the campaign, the idea was to make deeper inroads into the finicky Boston luxury car market and to reinforce brand perception of Prime Motor as an industry leader. “We’re trying to give that customer some enticement to return to the dealership and make a purchase,” says Anthony Monteiro, former director of business development at Prime Motor Group and the brains behind the “Thank You” campaign. “It’s absolutely an attempt to establish a relationship and trust, but it’s also an attempt to wow the customer, to receive this postcard and basically run in the house and say, ‘Holy mackerel! Look at this!”
Since the launch, Prime Motor Group has sent out an average of 300 postcards a month - about 7200 since the rollout. “Thank You for Visiting” cards have gone out to potential car buyers throughout the Prime Motor Group family of franchises, which specializes in several high-end import models.
Monteiro reports that response to the campaign has been positive, with all 14 Prime franchises averaging about three to five postcard-generated sales per month. To track the effectiveness of the campaign, salespeople enter coupon information into Prime’s online CRM tool whenever a customer comes in to redeem the offer.
“We also get anecdotal feedback from the guys on the showroom floor saying, ‘There’s this guy we’ve been trying to reach for a week, and the next thing he shows up with his postcard,” says Monteiro. “Or we get customers saying [of the mailing], ‘How do you do that?’ They’re fairly impressed.”
The new system has allowed Prime to save on its overall media expense by cutting back on newspaper advertising. “We believe in keeping existing customers and going after customers through electronic media and direct mail,” says Monteiro. it’s shooting fish in a barrel, versus throwing a big net out there and hoping somebody picks your ad up.”
Monteiro admits that Prime Motor Group had been giving short shrift to the mail channel the past few years despite the medium’s reliability and effectiveness. “Ten years ago, we would use direct mail for everything,” he recalls. “Then the internet came along, and you could blow 50,000 e-mails out there and pretty much accomplish the same thing. Well, in the past five to seven years, our e-mail campaigns became ineffective because a lot of the e-mails were hitting spam filters.
“So I said ‘Let’s do some postcards’,” he continues. “When you get a postcard, you have to hold it in your hand and make a decision. Typically people put them aside if they think it’s something they can use. That’s where we found that postcards are so effective.”
As part of the campaign development, Monteiro and AmazingMail.com collaborated to create an information matrix that included a variety of interchangeable demographic components. The system can generate personalized postcards within hours of a customer’s showroom visit or Internet inquiry.
Now when a customer comes in to inquire about a purchase, Prime is ready with sales information and a follow-up pitch. So if the customer tests out, say, a six-cylinder, four-door Japanese luxury sedan, but decides not to buy it, Prime’s system goes into action. Hours after the visit, AmazingMail.com gets a feed of the potential buyer’s name, the model he or she looked at and the identity of the salesperson and sales manager who spoke with the prospect. The system will pull an image of a car and put it on the front of the card, and on the back include all of the information specific to that particular customer’s profile and preferences. Within three days, the customer will receive that postcard in the mail, with an offer specific to that particular car.
For Monteiro, the ongoing postcard campaign has driven home the importance of promptness in seizing on chances for follow-up dialogue with prospects. “These days, when you talk to anybody at marketing seminars, you hear that the message has to be timely and relevant,” Monteiro says. “Being able to accomplish that with a postcard was a home run. It’s been one of our cheapest and most effective ways to bring customers back into the store.”
June 9th, 2009
Source: Deliver, A Magazine for Marketers (v. 4, issue 1, March 2008)
Author: Christopher Caggiano
A new twist on direct mail coupons sweetens the pot for incentive programs.
After the devastation of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, many of New Orleans’ businesses struggled to get back on their feet. Bruce Frommeyer - who owns eight Subway Restaurants in the area - was able to get up and going faster than many, thanks partially to a high-tech twist on a vintage incentive: direct mail coupons.
“After we got back online, we needed something to supplement Subway’s corporate advertising,” he says. “I’ve tried fliers in marriage mail, newspaper ads and inserts, but all these things don’t let you target one store. And that’s the key to my business right now. I need to bring it down to the neighborhood level.”
Fortunately for Frommeyer, Subway Restaurants had recently teamed with Database Marketing Group (DMG) to offer a systemwide program that allows the owners to go online and customize individualized mailings that can saturate every nearby customer - whether they are at home or at work. Franchise owners can send coupon posters to local businesses, which are posted in lunchrooms for access by all employees.
“The fast food category has historically been mass-media driven, but like most other retail industries, there’s been a significant shift toward direct mail,” says Kurt Whitmer, executive vice president of DMG. “With the introduction of TIVO and DVR technology and increasingly less effective mass media, fast food restaurants are looking for cost-effective solutions that allow them to saturate their individual neighborhoods.”
Until now, the direct mail process for individual fast food outlets was widely criticized as laborious and inefficient. “You had to get all of the franchisees to submit manual orders,” recalls Whitmer. “You had to get everybody in line to print and mail together. You had to get everybody synced up. It was like herding cats.”
To achieve the economies of scale, the franchises all had to adopt the same offers, mail dates and creative. Such hurdles made some campaigns more trouble than they were worth to many franchise owners.
The DMG system provides a 24/7 online ordering function that uses variable data printing (VDP) for small quantity, weekly production dates. Storeowners can log on, customize their mailing and mail any week they choose. They can customize everything from the offer itself to the hours, map, phone number and location-specific benefits.
DMG, working with various Subway marketing departments, makes several different mailer “shells” available, but franchises can customize their offer to their needs and neighborhood.
“The ‘Southwest’ sandwich may not resonate in Manhattan, but it will work well in San Diego and Phoenix,” says Whitmer.
Franchise owners can also specify exactly which consumers they want to reach: families with children, new movers, young adults, seniors or all households within the appropriate mailing radius for each location. And when mailing to businesses, franchises can target all the way down to a specific office building, block or neighborhood.
Bruce Frommeyer says customization has been a major reason for his stores’ resurrection. “The great thing about the system is that I can actually make the mailing area as small or as large as I want,” he says. “I can select an increasingly larger or smaller radius, and the system will tell me the number that’s available to mail in that region.”
That selectivity makes this direct mail program a lot more useful than ads in local newspapers, Frommeyer says. “If I buy a newspaper ad for $1,200, it covers an area with 20 other Subways,” he reasons. “Now I can spend that same $1,200 on mail and target residential or commercial, whatever I want.”
The overall result is that, while the actual size of the mailings is smaller, the overall efficiency is significantly higher. “There’s a lot less waste and you don’t have to spend a lot of time or money to get outstanding results,” ways Whitmer. “Several of our fast food clients have documented redemptions higher than any other media they’ve tried.”
He adds that store owners, always looking for the most effective ways to get even the slightest bump up in their ROI, get a lot more information about the effectiveness of their individual campaigns. “They can calculate, ‘For every dollar I invest, I get X amount in return’,” says Whitmer. “When you run a radio or a TV spot, you usually can’t quantify the response and sales lift. But with mail, you can tell exactly which consumers came in, how much they spent and how far they traveled.”
Bruce Frommeyer, for one, is thankful for the reach and immediacy of the Subway Restaurants coupon program. “If I had had this back in the beginning,” he says, “it would have been my primary form of advertising.”
March 14th, 2008
Source: Deliver: Let’s Get Personal (A Magazine for Marketers); Volume 4; Issue 1; March 2008
Author: Jon Gilbert
These days, the University of Alabama’s direct mail campaigns for our athletic department are earning an A+.
In the past, the grade was not nearly as high. For years, the Alabama athletic department used the old dinosaur method of direct mail for our season ticket renewals for Crimson Tide football and basketball; we mail you the form and you send it back…with very little pizzazz. The direct mail piece yielded acceptable results, yet it offered very little information about how the consumer was interacting with the brand.
With this in mind, we created in 2007 a personalized direct mail campaign with an Internet component. Season ticketholders were sent a postcard with a picture of Bryant-Denny Stadium (home of the Crimson Tide) and their names were spelled out on the field by our band. The mailers also included a PURL address with the season ticketholder’s name in it. Site visitors saw images of Bryant-Denny Stadium with their name spelled out by the band and our varsity cheerleaders holding a sign up with the ticketholder’s name - “J-O-N-G-I-L-B-E-R-T, it’s your day at Bryant-Denny Stadium!”
The campaign was a success. Season ticketholders renewing online more than doubled, saving the ticket office valuable time and resources in processing mailed-in renewals. And we sold approximately $50,000 in personalized Bryant-Denny Stadium posters. Perhaps most important, the direct mail, with the PURL sites, enabled us to track results and learn more about our fan base. We’ve begun a new direct mail piece with the Crimson Tide Foundation, the athletic department’s non-profit arm. The campaign helped generate more than $300,000 in revenue in its first six months.
The Tide is rolling with personalized direct mail.
March 3rd, 2008
Source: Printing Impressions, October 2007
Author: PODi’s Best Practices in Digital Print
Being in the printing industry, it’s hard not to have skewed view of developments in the variable data marketing arena. The topic has received so much play, it’s easy to assume everyone has heard about this marketing technique and technology by now. Certainly, it has to be old hat for a marketing force such as Disney.
Until last year, however, Disney Destinations had been sending out a generic package to anyone who contacted the company for information about booking an event at one of Disney’s five resort properties. Worse yet there was no follow-up with these prospects. The sales staff just waited for that person to initiate contact again - or not - after receiving the materials.
Disney Destinations’ marketing department decided the time had come to revamp the collateral materials and practices the company used with business-to-business prospects. It was sending out “a box of pamphlets” to every prospect, many of which didn’t apply to the given recipient. The cost of storing and printing the materials was high and, if any details changed, the materials had to be discarded and reprinted.
[The Proposition]
Disney Destinations had worked with Royal Impressions on a few projects before, including a customer “Welcome” mailer project, so it was comfortable teaming up with the company on a solution. Along with digital and offset printing, the marketing and graphic communications provider offers data analytics, creative, variable data and e-mail services.
Starting with the same approach used for the Welcome mailer, the event company’s manager already had a vision for a strategy and had created a mock-up of a personalized brochure. Working together, the companies developed a plan that would allow the Disney Destinations sales team to customize materials to each person who called or inquired via the Website for information about facilities for an event.
According to the plan, each prospect is to receive a full-color, 24-page booklet tailored to provide all of the information the group needs to make a decision, including the options that are appropriate for the type of event being planned. People who ask about booking a small meeting, for example, receive information only about services related to smaller venues and not larger conference facilities.
[The Solution]
To get the project started, contact information for dormant prospects - people who had asked for information, but who hadn’t booked an event - was used. Also included in this prospect group were people who had previously booked an event, but hadn’t booked another one in the past 12 months.
Customized booklets were, and continue to be, produced and mailed by Royal Impressions. Content - copy and images - are drawn from a database based on information collected by the sales team about the prospect. Each booklet is 100 percent variable, with the names of the event, sponsor and prospect used throughout, and the pages built from 3,000 combinations of text and images. Files are sent twice a week to the printer, where they are produced and mailed to prospects within 72 hours.
Royal Impressions produced the initial run of 1,650 booklets using a Xerox DocuColor 6060 digital production system and Xerox ASF 100 bookletmaker. Pages were prepared with Pageflex Mpower variable data software.
[The Results]
Based on the very positive response from the original group of prospects, Disney Destinations discontinued its use of static sales collateral. It now mails out customized booklets to 25 - 50 prospects a week. Both response rates and conversion rates have more than doubled because “prospects are happy to just get the information they need to make a decision.” The company’s printing and storage costs have been cut in half and, if details need to be changed, there no longer is any wasted material because nothing is printed in advance.
Encouraged by the results, the event company has launched marketing initiatives - such as e-mail campaigns - that encourage recipients to request a booklet and educate new clients on Disney’s offerings. Whenever the company does an e-mail campaign, the message includes a link to a personalized URL where the prospect can fill out the necessary information to receive a customized brochure.
Disney Destinations has also been following up with prospects who received a brochure, but didn’t respond or call to book an event. Having access to the information provided by prospects makes it easier for the sales team to talk with them.
Once the initial phase of the new marketing strategy was completed, the company began the process of renting e-mail lists and finding prospects to reach out to people who haven’t initiated contact. Working with Royal Impressions, Disney Destinations is also developing more customized communications, including a possible “What’s New” mailer.
October 24th, 2007
What does time mean?
To a traditional print sales rep, it means being able to produce a hot job. Typically, a hot job is a deadline of 24 hours or less. Digital printing obviously provides this kind of capability, but technological advancements have made this possible in the offset world as well.
So what does this mean? It means that printing sales reps must be able to provide the ability to save other people time. This can be the true value of digital. A digital printing company can offer corporations the ability to use less paperwork and spend a vastly reduced amount of time processing print. A more automated process allows a person to submit a production job just as he/she would print to a desktop printer.
The end result - digital printing allows companies can save time, money, and resources.
September 17th, 2007
Article From Digital Printing Report (Digital Printing Council, Volume 14, Number 4)
Author: Julie Shaffer
Although I’ve spent a fair amount of my time over the past five years studying, talking, and writing about Adobe’s Portable Document Format, I was always a tad confounded at just how well, important, it has become. PDF is, after all, just a file format, yet virtually every prepress workflow solution is built around or easily produces/digests PDF files. PDF has at least two dedicated websites, PlanetPDF and PDFZone (both of which, astoundingly, manage to report PDF-related news on an almost daily basis). Dozens of books have been written in the format’s name, along with hundreds of articles, and thousands of PDF-related questions and comments have been posted on forums and listservs. And while it isn’t the first PDF-specific conference, this year’s PDF 2007 event, a two-day conference to be held in Orlando May 9-10, offers five tracks of PDF-specific seminars and features Al Gore as the keynote speaker. Politics aside, it’s pretty amazing that a file-format has a conference devoted to it, much less one that can boast a former Vice President of the United States as a keynote!
Saying all this, I find it equally fascinating that there hasn’t been more fanfare over Adobe’s recent announcement that it plans to turn the PDF specification over to ISO. This means that the current version of the PDF specification, 1.7, is the last one to be developed entirely by Adobe - all future development will be done by a standards committee. Considering the molasses-like speed at which these standards groups move, this likely means that we won’t see another version of the PDF spec until 2012. More interesting, though, is the very fact that Adobe is willing to release control of development of PDF to others. PDF truly is a de facto standard for file exchange in the graphic communications industry and information delivering and gathering for the government. But that isn’t a recent development; it has been the case for a number of years. And we already have a series of PDF-related ISO specs, with PDF/X for print, PDF/A for archival, and the pending PDF/E for engineering and PDF/UA for universal access. So why would Adobe turn over the spec now?
It could be due to the possible competitive threat posed by Microsoft’s XPS (XML Paper Specification), a page description format that some have crowned the “PDF Killer.” Since XPS is not a cross-platform specification (i.e., Mac and Linux users are out in the cold) and doesn’t allow Type 1 fonts, XPS probably won’t take over the print production world at least. Then again, Adobe is developing its own XML-based product, dubbed Mars, which is more likely the head-to-head competitor of XPS. XPS could be enough of a threat that Adobe feels turning PDF over to ISO will cement its place as a true standard. Microsoft, too, has its own proposed ISO standard, Open Office XML, so it could be a kind of standards race between two software superpowers.
Whatever the reason, making PDF an ISO standard will, in the long run, make things better for those of us in the printing industry, if for no other reason than it will likely lead to more consistent PDF files coming into prepress departments. So look for those ISO-certified PDF files, coming…probably not so soon.
May 4th, 2007