Finishing a Marketable Piece of Print
Print Action

Generally speaking, if a marketing piece doesn't grab a potential consumer in the first three seconds, you've lost them. By the day, it is getting more difficult to grab the attention of a consumer with a printed piece. Today's consumer is bombarded with more trendy mediums. Messages can reach a laptop with full-sound animation or hang a few feet overhead in vibrant videos stuck to the sides of downtown buildings.

In this technologically rich environment, advertisers and marketers are working harder with the printing companies to produce appealing printed pieces. Harmonious typography and a wonderful page layout can only take a printed piece so far. The finishing of a printed piece, although often an afterthought, can be critical to a campaign's success. This month, I look closely at a few methods that can add the needed impact for your future projects.

Personalization

People are no longer shocked to see their name magically appear on a piece of direct mail. In most cases the marketing campaign arrived in an envelope stuffed with many single sheets of paper, but there is only one sheet that actually contains your name and the rest are images or text relating to what you need to buy. However, this process is becoming more enticing to marketers.

With mountable inkjet heads on bindery equipment, products like a saddle-stitched book can be personalized in two or even three different areas of the book, and not necessarily on the same signature. As a very simple example, a 32-page booklet consisting of two 16-page signatures can be personalized on the cover (as a direct-mail piece) and then again on the eighteenth page for order processing.