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XMPie Case Study - DME AutoNation Campaign

DME provides highly sophisticated, personalized direct marketing services to Fortune 500 clients, helping them to attract and retain customers. Their services include direct mail, voice broadcasting, internet applications, multimedia CD-ROMs, inbound and outbound telephony, database management, and broadcast e-mails.

DME was in the process of producing cutting-edge printed campaigns for AutoNation—the largest US retailer of new and used vehicles. AutoNation consists of 373 different franchises, comprising 35 different brands, in 17 states. The AutoNation campaigns were particularly difficult to produce because in addition to personalizing each piece to the individual recipient, they involve extensive “versioning” of a base form for each franchise and brand.

To meet this challenge, DME had taken a brute force approach—producing preprinted stock “shells” for each campaign and brand. These were then carted to DME’s humidity-controlled warehouse, stored, counted for individual print runs, and carted back for each limited print run in which the personalized information was overprinted. The laser overprinting for each version required painstakingly detailed programming. This was a very expensive, labor- and inventoryintensive process involving multiple setups, print runs and trips to the warehouse. DME was looking for a way to reduce inventory, manage the various brands, process multiple personalized orders in the same print run and provide a better means of response tracking to AutoNation.

Utilizing the XMPie PersonalEffectTM system (uPlanTM, uCreateTM, and uProduceTM), Adobe® InDesign®, and Xerox® iGen3TM printers, DME was able to treat each campaign as a single project even though it involved multiple AutoNation brands and dealers. PersonalEffect was used to create dynamic documents and manage the workflow. With uPlan, the business rules for composing the individualized offers were programmed independent of the design. With the uCreate plug-in for InDesign, text and graphics (including customer, dealer, and brand information) became data-driven variable objects instead of static fields. Throughout production, these variable objects were assigned and previewed in real-time within the InDesign document. The Xerox iGen3 printer seamlessly received the digital print stream of personalized documents and output customized pieces in a single print run. In addition, each piece now included a personalized Response URL which led each recipient to an automatically generated personalized web page to review and respond to their personalized offer.

XMPie, Adobe and Xerox combined to deliver results far beyond DME’s expectations. In DME CEO Mike Panaggio’s words, “Our new stock form is a blank piece of paper. Productivity has increased, responses to the pieces are up 35%, revenues are up 65%, and our cost of production has decreased versus the hybrid offset/digital method. This approach has energized DME, become a rallying point for our team, and has become a source of commitment for our employees and customers.”

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