Publishing

Marketing magazine was able to digitally personalise 5,000 magazine covers and send them to individual subscribers. This kind of tailored cover design sets a new benchmark for all magazine publishers.

Brief
Marketing magazine was planning a cover story on regional marketing - explaining how baby boomers are moving out of major urban centres, and the opportunities that was creating for marketers and media buyers. The publication wanted to create a cover theme that sensibly complemented the main story while making best possible use of personalisation of each copy.

Strategy
Digital printing was an obvious solution for the requirements of the brief. However Marketing magazine's subscriber data was fairly simple. Essentially, it only consisted of name and address details.

The magazine worked with Penfold Buscombe's experts to plan a solution that could make the best use of our digital press capabilities, within the restriction of the database.

The unique magazine covers would employ image and typographic changes, tailored around the name and address data for each subscriber.

Solution
The final cover idea was centred on a winding regional road, seen through a car windscreen, signifying the move from city to regional centres.

Within this image, Penfold Buscombe was able to customise the rear vision mirror to show the State Capital matching the state from each recipien's address. (eg. Victorian subscribers viewed an image of Melbourne in the rearview mirror, Queensland subscribers viewed an image of Brisbane, etc.)

Looking forward, another road sign named a popular regional area, again matched to the subscriber's state (Mornington Peninsula for Victoria, Central Coast for NSW, etc), which used the subscribe's name in an invitation to see the story inside. A mobile phone inside the car displayed a personalised SMS message talking directly to the subscriber utilising their name and suburb.

And finally, the traditional contents bar at the head of the magazine cover featured the recipien's full name credited to the first story, which was jokingly headlined: 'Cranky non-subscribers crave personal copies'. After artwork was created by the team at Marketing magazine, Penfold Buscombe was able to manage the entire database programming for the cover and set up the business rules.

PDF proofs were then created for the magazine to sign off before the digital print run commenced. Once the personalised covers had been printed, they were despatched to Marketing's mailhouse, where they were bound with the balance of the magazine and posted.

Key Achievements
Using digital printing to personalise individual covers also allows Marketing magazine to demonstrate its own familiarity with cutting edge print communication techniques - something that its subscribers would be expected to look for.

The response was very encouraging and positive. As a cover, this personalised version inspired an unprecedented rush of complimentary phone calls, emails and letters to the team at Marketing.