Category: Ideas & Inspiration

Trish Witkowski Featured in Online Direct & Dimensional Presentations

Posted On: Category: Direct Mail Marketing, Ideas & Inspiration, Shout-OutsPosted By:

Trish Witkowski, chief folding fanatic at foldfactory.com will be featured in two free live-streaming online presentations highlighting direct and dimensional mail at 9 a.m. and 10:30 a.m. on Tuesday, Aug. 20.

Dimensional & Direct mail online presentations

The presentations are part of  “Adobe Creative Cloud Design Week,” hosted by creativeLive, a fast-growing live, online classroom for creative entrepreneurs that was recently featured in TechCrunch and The New York Times.

Witkowski, an expert in folded solutions for print and mail, hosts a popular video series entitled “60-Second Super-Cool Fold of the Week” on her YouTube channel.

“I’m so excited to be a part of this event,” states Witkowski. “It’s an incredible opportunity to reach a global audience of creative professionals and to share my passion for direct mail and print. I’ve spent my entire career researching folding and, in recent years, mail – and I know I can help people get amazing results. It’s going to be a blast.”

The events will stream live at their scheduled times at creativeLIVE.com and will be rebroadcast within a 24-hour period. For more information and to RSVP for the free events visit creativeLIVE.com.

About the presentations

“Direct Mail to the MAX” (9:00am PT/12:00pm ET) The 90-minute presentation is focused on the process behind creating direct mail that performs. She will cover audience, strategy and planning, format choice and engagement techniques, testing, tracking and measurement. She plans to back up the information with powerful real-world case studies. Trish will also be launching her new publication series, “Direct Mail (simplified)”, during the event.

“That’s Fold-tastic!” (10:30am PT/1:30pm ET) For this presentation, Trish will be sharing her best folding tips, tricks and formats from nearly 20 years of research on the topic. This fun and inspiring session will feature some of the most fascinating real-world folded solutions from her vast collection of print samples. She will also make a move to the desktop to share some production techniques for creating accurate Adobe InDesign files for folded materials.

 

 

3 Reasons to Follow Structural Graphics on Pinterest

Posted On: Category: Custom Design & Printing, Ideas & InspirationPosted By:

Since visual art and design is one of our biggest passions, Structural Graphics has lots of reasons to be pinning away on Pinterest. Here are three reasons why you should be following us.

1. Samples of our work.

Allergan flower mailer resized 600

Curious about what dimensional marketing can do for your business? Well, stroll on over to our Pinterest page for a peek at what we’ve done.

2. Inspiration.

Since our page is curated by one of our awesome paper engineers, you get an inside look at what designs inspire our creatives. Like this:

via jurianne matter blogspot

Image above via juriannematter.blogspot.com

3. Meet our peeps.

Put a face to the name. Meet the incredible team who creates our amazing dimensional marketing pieces.

heather ertel Structural Graphics resized 600

Shown above, Heather Ertel, director of marketing at Structural Graphics.

You’ll even find some fun bonus stuff to check out, like this adorable three-year-old’s reaction to our pop-up work:

 

 

Happy pinning!

Talking Design with 3D Paper Engineer Bruce Foster

Posted On: Category: Custom Design & Printing, Dimensional Print Marketing, Luxury & Specialty Packaging, Shout-OutsTag(s): , , , Posted By:
Paper Engineer Bruce Foster
Paper Engineer Bruce Foster

Last week, Bruce Foster, a renowned paper engineer, graphic designer and illustrator spent a day with the Structural Graphics team at their Essex, CT headquarters, enthralling them with a sampling of his incredible body of published pop-up designs. Continue reading →

Traits of Awesome Marketers Part I: Innovation

Posted On: Category: Ideas & Inspiration, Marketing Insights, Shout-OutsPosted By:

Structural Graphics is kicking off a month of awesomeness with a series of posts to help marketers breakthrough the clutter of their competition with insightful posts about what makes marketers, well, awesome.

This week’s post is all about innovation. One of the most distinctive traits of an awesome marketer is the ability to be innovative. Innovation helps marketers set their businesses apart from the competition, gets people excited about the company or brand, and makes waves in the industry.

Let’s take a look at how some big companies are using innovation to keep their audiences engaged.

Awesome Marketers Skew Reality and Fantasy

Americans love to interact with their entertainment. It’s why 24.75 billion dollars went to the gaming industry in 2011 according to a 2012 Entertainment Software Association report, and the top selling game of 2011 was Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, a game that positions players as soldiers on extreme military missions.

With an increasing interest in entertainment that feels like real life, it’s not surprising that some of the best marketing campaigns are the ones that bring fantasy right to your doorstep, like HBO did a few weeks ago to promote the premier of Game of Thrones. In early March, New York Times readers opened up a weekday edition to find the shadow of a dragon flying overhead with accompanying fake articles inspired by the show’s plot. The ad got fans talking, creating a buzz on Twitter:

Similiarly, when ad agency, Leo Burnett Toronto created an zombie billboard at the Toronto Union Station for the premiere of Walking Dead fans got excited. The agency took it a step further by sawing off zombie fingers to countdown the mid-season premiere and sending them to fans who took pictures with the billboard and posted them on Twitter. This person even made a gif.

In both cases HBO and AMC created a buzz by cleverly interrupting our daily life with something fantastical, and it made people happy and eager to start watching their favorite shows again.

Awesome Markerters Personify Their Brand

Case in point: Allstate Insurance Company. Allstate has the right ingredients in its Mayhem TV ads featuring a smooth-talking, rugged, sneering guy destined to make your life hell. In some episodes he’s a deer, a bad GPS or a blown out water heater and in others he’s a torrential downpour standing over your car’s open sunroof with a garden house.

Allstate’s SVP of Marketing, Lisa Cochrane said in Adweek, “We’re talking about value in an entirely new way,” she says. “With so many advertising messages focusing on convenience and price, consumers had been lulled into thinking of insurance as a commodity. We had to disrupt the conversation but do it in a respectful way.”

That recipe has definitely increased Allstate’s consumer engagement; Mayhem’s Facebook page has garnered 1.5 million fans and Allstate now has over 6 million video views on YouTube.

Awesome Marketers Are One with the Times

Awesome marketers know that the industry is always changing, so they stay on top of trends and figure out new ways to connect with their audience.

The folks over at Volkswagon are well aware that many consumers record their favorite shows on DVR and fast forward through commercials. So in an attempt to reach as many viewers as possible the company developed a “slowmercial”, or TV ad that can be seen at both normal and fast speeds. Volkswagon estimates that the slowmercial will have 50% more impact than their traditional commericals. It’s currently only airing in Belgium, so we’ll have to wait and see how that works out for US audiences.

This innovative approach demonstrates the creativity of the company as well as it’s understanding of its audience.

Have you been blown away by any creative and innovative marketing campaigns lately? Share them with us in the comments below.

 

What Gary Vaynerchuk teaches us about passion and social networks

Posted On: Category: Branding, Ideas & Inspiration, Marketing Insights, Shout-Outs, TechnologyPosted By:

If there is one thing social media is good for it’s showing off your passion. People use sites like Twitter, YouTube and Facebook to show off their passions for all types of things; politics, music, movies, etc. Businesses need to do the same thing with their social media efforts.

I just got finished reading the book “Crush It” by Gary Vaynerchuk, founder of WineLibrary.com and Wine Library TV. This guy is a bit crazy but there is a fine line between passion and crazy. He absolutely loves talking about wine and he uses YouTube, Twitter and Facebook to do it. The main theme of the book is that anyone can build a successful business or brand using social networks, as long as they have passion for what they’re doing. Honestly, I don’t care much for wine. I couldn’t tell you what goes well with a steak, or what wine to bring to a shwanky dinner party; but when I checked out Gary’s YouTube videos I was hypnotized. His passion explodes on camera and even though I had no interest in wine, I watched a bunch of his videos. It will come as no surprise that Gary has built his Wine business from a $2 million a year wine store in New Jersey, to an enormous online wine empire.

You may be asking yourself how you can make your business interesting enough for Twitter or YouTube. The truth is with all of the millions of users online there is bound to be a community of fans. Not everyone’s business is as sexy as fine wine, but once you begin to put quality content online people will listen.

Your customers and prospects are online right now. Some are browsing Facebook pages, some are twittering their hearts out and some are perusing YouTube videos. Oh and some are reading blogs!

Thanks for stopping by.

David Granger named Editor of the Year by AdWeekMedia

Posted On: Category: Ideas & Inspiration, Shout-OutsPosted By:

Esquire Editor-in-Chief, David Granger is known for pushing the envelope. He has continuously embraced print while exploring different ways to integrate new technologies into this medium. From the commemorative e-Ink cover we produced to the recent AR cover, David is continuously pushing the envelope.  Congratulations Dave on being named MediaWeek’s 2010 Editor of the Year. Click here to read the full article.

Esquire Flirts With Digital Reality

Posted On: Category: Audio / Video Marketing, Custom Design & Printing, Ideas & Inspiration, Marketing Insights, Technology, Virtual Reality / Augmented RealityPosted By:

Hollywood stars are going virtual, in the latest effort to jazz up the printed word-and wake up consumers who have become inured to traditional ads.

Hearst Corp.’s Esquire magazine will pepper its December issue with markers that trigger interactive video segments featuring cover subject Robert Downey Jr. and other actors, as well as an ad for Lexus. In doing so, Esquire is taking advantage of an emerging technology called augmented reality, which mixes real-life images with graphics or other effects. TV networks use AR to make the yellow first-down lines on football fields.

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