Promo News
Archive for August, 2009
PROMO’S 2009 P&I Survey Finds Signs of Change in Customer Incentives
Aug 31st
As with many other marketing channels this year, flat seems to be the new up for companies surveyed in the 2009 Promo Premiums and Incentives survey
ASI Promotes Industry on MSNBC
Aug 31st
ASI publisher Rich Fairfield made like a TV star last week during a lively appearance on MSNBC’s “Your Business.” The hot topic was the proven value of using ad specialties to market your business at trade shows.
As Rich and host J.J. Ramberg told their TV audience of 200,000, trade shows are a great way to [...]
Thriller Flashmob Does Trafalgar on MJ’s 51st
Aug 31st
All the fun coordinated playtime stuff happens on Trafalgar Square. It gets Beatles karaoke (courtesy of T-Mobile!), it gets turfed, and on Saturday it hosted the largest-ever flashmob to dance to Thriller in tandem.
Promotional products international
Aug 31st
A short reminder for our international readers, this blog is also available in other languages, most posts are the same as you’ll find on the english version, but there is often more local information on these blogs :
Articulos publicitarios
Objets Publicitaires
Werbemittel und Geschenke
Relatiegeschenken
Oggetti Pubblicitari
Shameless Promotion Month!
Aug 30th
According to Chase’s Calendar of Events, September is Shameless Promotion month and I’m looking forward to seeing what Admar Promotions Group is up to this month! (more…)
The Verdana Monologues ? When Ikea?s Designers go Kabookskik
Aug 30th
COLUMN: I got my Ikea catalog last week, and like many in the design field, thought something had changed but wasn’t quite sure what. Due to the fact I have been working on the Web more than the printed design space the past five years, it actually took me a little bit to notice the fonts had changed throughout. About the same time, this past Thursday I started to see a whole raft of online articles, blogs and business media responding to the “uproar” about the change: Ikea had changed their typeface. Holy Crap!
Now, while this falls about as low as one can get down the pole of what matters in the world right now, below unemployment, health care, and so forth, it’s nevertheless become a rallying cry, or topic du jour for the design community who despair over things as minute as the space between headline letters (ahem, I do that, too, admittedly; it’s called “kerning”), that Ikea has switched from a rich custom type font, to the lowest common denominator, a type face created for the Internet by Microsoft, called Verdana. A style of type which was not designed for print where the lovely bits interact with ink and paper, but for the cold cathode ray tube (CRT), and other display technologies which have evolved into LCD, OLED, plasma, and e-ink.
The main upset seems to stem from the fact that Ikea has “always been known for design.” And this is true, to an extent. Ikea has always had a mix of super cheap pressed board crap clothed in lovely colors and silly Sweden-inspired names with a healthy dose of umlauts, very cool desk accessories, storage stuff, and some often inspired decor pieces, as well as some lovely high-end “real wood” furniture pieces. I know, my curved desk I’m working on now, my bedroom furniture, my living room wall unit, and book cases all came from Ikea during the ’90s. I’ve been a graphic designer since my teenage years (ahem, the late ’70s/early ’80s), and I always “dug” the stuff at Ikea because it was both affordable, but some was really cool, too. Plummers was here first, and I tend to like their stuff better now, but Ikea really was a fun place to walk through and look at the mix of whacky desk lamps, and grid design flat-packed furniture.
So, this issue with Verdana … well, the problem stems (sort of a pun there for you typographers) from the fact that it doesn’t look as good when printed large as a headline, compared to a font which has been “drawn” to look good at large sizes, letter space (kerning) is harder to control, and because it’s a wide, open style, whereas many headline styles are designed to have thinner curves, and narrower widths to fit better in page layouts. Verdana just wasn’t built for the world of magazines and newspapers. All you really need to do is look at any price that has a 1 in it, like a large $129 price. The horizontal space, or white space between the 1 and 2 is too much, and creates an unpleasant empty space, even when kerned close together. Yeah, it’s true. But, really, so what. Verdana works because it’s big, blocky and seems to be missing subtle curves in places, and sometimes looks like it’s bold, even when it’s not. But you can read it at a distance, up close, and it shouts its readability. Not as pretty as the old font, admittedly.
But really, is that a bad thing? I am very knowledgeable about type, having gone to Compugraphic Typesetting School in 1984, and I also got my start in design with blue pencils, and dry-transfer lettering which went onto art boards by hand. I had my own typesetting business in 1987, and I started doing Web design in 1994. Verdana was a popular font once it was introduced because it looked great at font size 1 in HTML, whereas Times and Arial/Helvetica did not. Before CSS, it was common practice to use Verdana for footers, captions, small type, superscripts, and navigation. And for text on, ironically, many of the design oriented Web sites that wanted to use something other than Times or Helvetica.
Yes, Verdana is a font introduced by Microsoft, and was often eschewed by the Mac oriented design community simply because of that, and it being a “Web font,” not designed for print. Funny thing, too, is that the Mac version of another Microsoft font, Georgia, really does look gorgeous on the Mac, and has many of the traditional type elements, where the Windows version is more blocky. I ran into this when I chose to use Georgia for our company logo in 2000, but when we switched to Windows XP in 2006, the font didn’t look the same when you viewed it at 400%, or printed it at headline sizes like 72 pt. I haven’t looked at Verdana on the Mac lately vs. on Windows, but wouldn’t be surprised if there is a slight difference there as well. I chose Georgia for our company for the exact same reason Ikea chose Verdana, it’s a cross-platform, multi-language, multi-format type face – meaning, you can use it for print, for Web, for PDF, for video, and you can have a consistency. And, it does look very clean and open when translated to other languages; Microsoft did a great job at that.
Now it turns out Ikea is on the defensive because designers claim they have been violated, betrayed, and that Ikea should go back to its original corporate fonts. There is even a petition circulating to tell Ikea to go back to its original style.
In my opinion, that’s a mistake. Frankly, Ikea is acting in a designer frame of mind, they have chosen to go their own way and embrace a standardized font which everybody recognizes. What many of the dinosaur design community is missing is that many of Ikea’s core audience, the folks getting their first apartments, their dorm room furnishings, first couple living together, etc., are now folks who grew up with the Internet. Many of the young adults buying their first EXPEDIT, JAVNAKER, or KVART, have more experience reading their iMac screen, and MySpace page than they do reading the New York Times or Newsweek.
Frankly, Verdana “communicates” very well with youth culture because it’s the typeface of their generation, not their great grandparents. Sure, Futura or Optima, or any of the lovely Adobe or ITC fonts give us a rich history of details in the hand-making of letter styles, but for advertising, marketing and the sale of goods and services, this was a calculated and intelligent design choice.
It’s a business, not a design contest. In a worldwide depressed economy, anything a company can do to standardize, and become more efficient should be applauded and not derided. Of course, most designers work for somebody else and don’t have to deal with the business issues. Very few are both left brain and right brain enough to understand why Ikea has chosen to do this. The negative publicity the design community has drawn out regarding this change has, in fact, proven the point that Ikea’s designers made the right choice. End of days? Not quite.
Isn’t it a designer’s prerogative to buck conventions and question the standard way of doing something, and choose not to do what is expected? What’s wrong with choosing to use the “wrong” thing, to make the right choice for a brand style? Kudos Ikea team, you make me proud for proving you do have what it takes to be a mover in the world of design.
Copyright © 2009 Advertising Industry Newswire(TM). A unit of Neotrope® – all rights reserved. For Licensing Information, contact legal@advertisingindustrynewswire.com
Part of the NEOTROPE®.News Network.
Free Direct Marketing White Paper Released by Ballantine Corporation
Aug 28th
WAYNE, N.J. /Advertising Industry Newswire/ — The Ballantine Corporation, a family-owned direct mail company, announces the release of a free direct marketing tip sheet, also known as a white paper, that provides clear and insightful direct marketing how-to information that will positively influence any business’s bottom line. The 50 tips offered in this direct marketing white paper are the result of interviewing a trusted network of 20 vendors. These tips are proven strategies for more effective and efficient campaigns.
“Since we provide a wide variety of direct marketing services, we have access to a large pool of highly-skilled vendors that we trust on a daily basis with our client’s projects,” says Ryan Cote, director of marketing, The Ballantine Corporation. “This tip sheet is a direct result of their expertise and ours.”
The direct marketing tip sheet contains practical tips that can be implemented today for positive results tomorrow. Categories include: creative, PURLs, email, mailing, envelopes and printing.
Here’s a quick preview of actionable tips:
For creative, did you know that customers prefer the look of foil over paper by 16 percent? Direct marketers can increase response rates simply by using silver or hologram labels.
And, based on Ballantine’s experience, staff reports that PURLs work best for lead generation, not for direct sales. However, they encourage direct marketers to test it out because results can of course vary.
If e-mail is the chosen direct marketing medium, before launching, make sure to test how it will look in different e-mail browsers such as Outlook, Gmail, and Yahoo!.
If mailing, always design a folded self mailer so the finished fold is on the bottom. This allows one wafer on top rather than two on the bottom and saves money.
What about envelopes? If you’re looking for an attractive, but inexpensive envelope, check out flexo printing and a web-style envelope. Flexo printing has come a long way and it can also produce half tones and solid coverage.
Finally – printing tips. If a continuous form has large areas of solid print or heavy copy, running it on a UV press will minimize any potential offsetting issues.
For all 50 tips, download here: www.ballantine.com/blog/direct-marketing-white-paper/ . (Note: registration required.)
For additional information on current direct marketing news and advice, visit: www.ballantine.com/blog .
Copyright © 2009 Advertising Industry Newswire(TM). A unit of Neotrope® – all rights reserved. For Licensing Information, contact legal@advertisingindustrynewswire.com
Part of the NEOTROPE®.News Network.
Swiss Army Takes Brand-Centric Road Trip
Aug 28th
Victorinox Swiss Army “Infantry Vintage Limited Edition” watch was among the pieces on display during the brand’s road trip in an Airstream trailer.
Deluxe Mousepad Successfully Incents Teen Girls to Register on an Internet Safety-Oriented Website for the Girl Scouts of San Gorgonio Council
Aug 27th
Challenge: Communicating a vital internet safety message to teen girls and driving registrations for and traffic to a new website.
Because “if we build it, they will come” seems to apply only to fast-food restaurants and discount retailers, website owners continually wrestle with the challenge of driving both live and virtual audiences to online venues. This struggle for traffic exists whether a website promotes products, services or, as in the case of the Girl Scouts of San Gorgonio Council (GSSGC), a public service message about Internet safety.
The GSSGC, with the help of some 5,000 dedicated adults, serves more than 15,000 girls between the ages of 5 and 17 in the Riverside-San Bernardino area of southeastern California, providing life skills and education in financial literacy, healthy living, outdoor skills, entrepreneurship, leadership and even science and engineering.
Thanks to a recent Girl Scouts and Microsoft Windows® partnership, girls aged 11 to 17 in southern California and all over the country now have online opportunities to learn life skills as they relate to Internet safety through a new interactive website called LMK, which stands for Let Me Know.
LMK, written primarily by girls, for girls, provides a way for girls to give each other the information they need to understand and safely navigate an online life—the thought being that youth are more receptive to such information when it comes from their peers rather than from parents or other adults. The site, filled with tips, polls and discussions, invites girls everywhere to register and participate by saying, “Go ahead: explore the site, create a profile, and make an impact.” The LMK program also includes a separate website for the parents of Girl Scouts, who more often than not know less about the realities of life online than do their girls.
Whereas Microsoft created and hosts the LMK website, local Girl Scout councils, like the GSSGC, promote it and find unique ways to incent girls to sign up. The GSSGC, already an ePromos customer whose team members have tapped the power of promotional products in the past, turned to a promotional giveaway that would not only incent girls to sign up but, also, drive new traffic to the site. The GSSGC team tells us that, for this promotion, they returned once again to ePromos because our web catalog offers an extensive variety of products—not 1,000 versions of the same-style pen—and consistently high quality products they can count on.
Solution: An ultra-thin, dye-sublimated, full-color SoftTouch® plush mousepad.
For the LMK promotion, the team primarily considered cost, product quality and product size: cost because their chosen product needed to fit within the confines of the LMK grant; size because the product they selected must hold the Council’s four-color-process logo and large LMK message; quality because it must also withstand the rough-and-tumble of a teen girl’s world, whether at the bottom of her book-bag, in her locker, or in her purse. They quickly determined that the best product to meet their criteria would be a Council/LMK-branded mousepad.
After exploring our website and identifying the highest-quality mousepad they could afford, the team called Promotions Specialist Jason Wallace, who managed their order from start to finish. Their choice: the ultra-thin, dye-sublimated, full-color SoftTouch® Plush Mousepad. This 7.5 x 8.5-inch pad, which starts with a white surface onto which colors are permanently dyed, feels as soft as a fresh, ripe peach or your favorite pair of flannel pajamas. On the pad, the team would have imprinted a teen-friendly yet provocative message: “Your friend. Your enemy. Your teacher. Your neighbor. {We R online 2.}” followed by “What are you revealing online? lmk.girlscouts.org has it covered.”
Result: Mousepads prove a sound investment, incenting signups in live and virtual campaigns.
After the pads arrived, the team launched an e-mail campaign offering girls a free mousepad in exchange for signing up on the LMK site. To keep the campaign fresh, the team uses an on-again-off-again approach, sending e-mails for a few weeks and then none at all. Local troop leaders also got involved with helping the girls signup to receive their mouse pads by forming a line in front of a computer where they could sign up. The Council team will also promote both their organization and the LMK site during an upcoming State women’s conference, where more than 11,000 women and girls are expected. The team will bring several computers to the event so girls can sign up immediately and receive their free mousepads.
The team reports that the mousepads were a great program investment, incenting girls to sign up, being easy to transport and hand-out, and providing a unique way to distribute information over the ubiquitous paper product, postcard or flyer. They have ordered 2,000 so far—and with continued program success, could use them all up before the end of September!
Browse through our collection of products that are perfect to promote your business to Non-profit Organizations.
Take a look at our full category of Custom Mousepads.
Find other products to Raise Awareness for your organizations cause.
Check out our special collection of 4-color Process Products.
Girl Scouts of San Gorgonio Council Mouse Pads Internet Safety Campaign (PDF Version).
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