DCI has been a long time supporter of non-profit organizations and in tough economic times, nothing has changed. DCI continues to provide excellent support.

On Sunday, November 1, the Akron Beacon Journal will run an article in the Sunday Premiere Section featuring the winner’s profiles as noted in the October issue of Akron Life & Leisure magazine.

On November 15, DCI will be honored as the recipient of the 2009 Arts Alive Business Support Award. Congratulations DCI! Below is a feature article from the October issue of Akron Life & Leisure:

 

10.06.09

There’s an old adage in the printing business: “You can have it fast, good or cheap. Pick two.” Surprisingly, DCI seems to have found a way to beat the odds.

Here’s a sampling of what four different clients had to say in letters nominating the printer for the Arts Alive! Business Support Award:

“DCI provides consistency and quality to every project they handle… They are eager to go the extra distance…” – Summit MRDD.

“When they say they will deliver, you can count on it being delivered! Whether you have been doing business for years or are a new nonprofit, DCI will treat you the same.” – METRO RTA

“DCI unfailingly comes to the rescue… Their finished product and customer service is outstanding!” – Tuesday Musical Association

“In tough economic times, support for charities by small companies often get postponed or eliminated. DCI has demonstrated outstanding support… Their in-kind donation (saved the equivalent of) 21,000 meals for the hungry.” – Akron-Canton Regional Foodbank

Enough said.

(Reprinted from Akron Life & Leisure, October 2009)

To commemorate 35 years of business excellence is a milestone that Quaker Steak & Lube Franchising Corporation celebrated recently at their 7th Annual Conference. Due to a long-standing relationship, DCI was invited to attend and meet franchise owners in person.

During the three day conference, franchise representatives visited the brand new Vendor Tradeshow. DCI provided each franchise with their own personalized pocket folders, notepads, calendars, and a variety of fun and interesting new concepts including the Pick-Up Wingo Drive-Thru featuring Gizzard Coop! Visiting the DCI trade booth, many wonderful compliments and kudos were given including the personalized letter written below from Marla Pieton. Thanks Marla, we had a blast being there and love working with all of you to provide an on-going pleasant eating experience for all of your customers!

10.06.09

Dear Mary & Dave,

Thank you so much for DCI’s sponsorship and participation in our Quaker Steak & Lube Franchise Conference 2009 that was recently held in Erie, PA. Your generosity helped to enable our entire Lube Community to come together.

Thank you too for the printing and doing a great job with your booth – it was awesome!

We look forward to your ongoing support and our continued relationship.

With sincere appreciation,

Marla Pieton & The Lube Family
Senior Director of Marketing
Quaker Steak & Lube

2009 marked the first year that Digital Color Imaging (DCI) participated in being one of the sponsors for  InterAction, which is a marketing conference held once a year in Akron, OH by the Taylor Institute for Direct Marketing. In the past, mailers were sent out to marketers of Ohio and beyond in an attempt to inform them about the conference so that they might attend. Due to the wide array of InterAction 2009 sponsors, the conference was supplied with more tools and resources than ever before. Teaming up together, the sponsors began developing a strategy to not only increase conference attendance, but to demonstrate the effectiveness of a direct marketing campaign that would be seen firsthand.

All direct marketing campaigns begin with a solid foundation of targeted data. The databases and spreadsheets from each sponsor were cleansed and combined to create our master database.

Our master database lacked some recipients’ email addresses which inspired us to use traditional mailers as our first mode of communication. The mailer stirred curiosity, offered essential information regarding the conference, and ended with a call to action that directed recipients to a webpage personalized for them. In order to keep all of our marketing efforts in sync and consistent, we developed a conference theme that spanned across all of our marketing efforts, including this mailer.

Using XMPie’s variable data personalization suite and a Xerox iGen 3, we were able to easily include unique content throughout every mailer that we printed as well as every webpage that we created. The personalized URLs (PURLs) that facilitated the conference registration process allowed us to update our master database with ease.

As visitors arrived to their PURL they were immediately presented with dynamic content directed specifically at them. “Hi Joseph, You are only 4.2 miles from InterAction 2009 where the focus on Direct Marketing is May 19, 2009.” Along with the name of the recipient, we dynamically pulled the distance from each recipient’s location and the address to InterAction 2009 held at The University of Akron.

 

 

 

Being that our theme revolved around zodiac signs, we decided to have a little fun with it and ask each visitor for their birth date. This data allowed us to determine what zodiac sign they fell under so that we could provide them with typical traits that correspond with their sign. Next, after providing visitors with a famous person that shared their sign, they were given a quick and easy online method of signing up for the conference.

Visitors who went through the registration process had an opportunity to update their mailing address, select their conference workshop track, and were required to submit an email address. All of this information was retained in our database; some records were updated and others were newly added. All of the collected information was retained, even the registrants’ birth dates. While the PURLs seemed like a short entertaining web experience, they served a much larger purpose in helping us cleanse and add to our database, allowing us even more opportunities for future campaigns.

From our database we were able to determine which recipients never went to their PURL, which ones had visited their PURLs, and which ones had both visited their PURL as well as registered for the conference. Everyone in our database, that had an email address associated with their contact information, received an email not long after the initial mailer was sent out. We dynamically generated two different types of emails that were populated with variable data content. The first email blast went out to those who had not registered for the conference and gave them notice that they still had time to sign up, directing them again to their personalized URL. The second email blast went out to those who had registered; thanked them; provided registration confirmation and a map link in real time.

In the end, the combined energy and resources put into the conference by all of the sponsors proved to pay off as conference attendance dramatically increased nearly three times from previous years. One to one marketing that put an extra focus on being personal and fun with our audience proved a success. The incredible power of creating dynamic media for marketing easily allowed us to personalize content such as text, images, personal URLs, and interactive flash. Our registration process not only provided us with the functionality of registration, but allowed us to cleanse and update our audience’s information.

To experience InterAction 2009’s PURL, please visit http://interaction2009.com/JoeLookabaugh. Note that this page will not be personalized for you but is an example targeted at a different recipient.

Digital Color Imaging (DCI) of Akron, Ohio has expanded its work as a communications services provider to include that of an environmental advocate. The company, which provides print and Web-based marketing communications, knows that its business can have an environmental impact not only in its own backyard, but the world at large, and has incorporated a wide variety of technologies, products and practices to ensure its clients’ communications are impactful, but its ecological footprint is not.

One way DCI has helped its clients go green is be leveraging XMPie software to create personalized, multi-channel communications spanning Web, e-mail and print. Since cutting out paper all together may not be an option for many organizations, the company advises its clients on how to incorporate highly-targeted online methods of communication, along with the strategic use of chemical-free, forest-friendly print. This personalized cross-media approach had proven beneficial to both Mother Nature and DCI’s clients’ bottom lines.

"We have started to see the cross-media light bulb go off with many of our clients," said Dave Welner, president, DCI. "They are thrilled with the idea that we can help them take a greener approach to business, while increasing their campaign response rates and profit margins."

In addition to using PersonalEffect for cross-media, DCI has also implemented XMPie’s uStore Web-to-print solution. By leveraging uStore, DCI has helped its customers eliminate unnecessary printing, while making their printed marketing materials even more targeted and relevant, in addition to far less wasteful.

Long-standing DCI client Norandex, a division of building material leader Saint-Gobain, has nearly 200 dealer locations across the country and is a firm believer in using local seminars to educate contractors on the proper installation of its products. Before uStore, DCI would print generic corporate shells for the seminar invitations. The shells would be shipped and stored for eventual laser printing with seminar-specific information and then mailed to each recipient. With uStore, DCI provides an online site for Norandex branch managers to upload customer mailing lists, customize seminar mailers, print exactly the amount needed and mail to recipients. This solution cut down on printing and reduced shipping and storage resources and expenses. The program had been a huge success, eliminating significant waste while increasing branch participation from 15 to 100 percent.

Please visit our Eco page to learn more about how DCI is leading the forefront in environmentally friendly printing.

 

*This article can also be found on the following websites:

> Graphic Arts Online  (www.GraphicArtsOnline.com)

> What They Think  (www.WhatTheyThink.com)

> Printing News  (www.PrintingNews.com)

> Quick Printing  (www.QuickPrinting.com)

Make Mine Extra Wide! DCI adds to their already robust arsenal of large-format capabilities with the addition of EFI's market-leading superwide digital inkjet printer, the VUTEk QS3200, offering customers dazzling high definition print on widths up to 10' wide.

DCI extends our UV-curable wide-format print operations with EFI's VUTEk QS3200, a new breed of print technology created by combining high production speeds with High-Definition Print (HDP) capability.

Much like HDTV has introduced breathtaking image quality to TV screens around the world, the VUTEk QS3200 HDP produces eye-popping pictures with print resolutions of up to 1080 dpi, six-color imaging, and a special seventh channel with white ink for more versatility than ever before. This means that we can create dazzling images and crisp 4-point text to meet the demanding quality standards of retail point of purchase displays, as well as produce brilliant signs, banners, jumbo posters, and other superwide applications.

We are a total visual communications company, so DCI's customers rely upon us to supply much more than typical print materials. We must be able to combine creativity with the capability to produce challenging high quality jobs meeting a wide range of different requirements. This new equipment broadens our capability to offer a comprehensive array of diverse services. For instance, it is designed to print on a variety of flexible and rigid substrates, outputting direct to rigid materials up to 126” wide and 2 inches thick, with quick change-over to flexible media taking less than a minute. We can offer even more creative applications by taking advantage of its ability to print white ink in six variations including overprint, underprint, spot, underspot, fill, and overspot.

Combine its quality and versatility with improved speed, and it's a big cost and timesavings for our customers, printing at speeds of up to 900 square feet or twenty-two 4'x8' boards per hour. The result is increased operator efficiency, enhanced even further by its feed-side control module that allows us to produce a near-continuous stream of printed output.

We also like that costly substrate waste is reduced by combining separate images and jobs to fully utilize available print space. Its small footprint saves valuable floor space, too, by producing roll to roll and rigid applications on one machine, so we have space left over for our many other in-house production requirements.

Printing and media distortions are present in all jobs, but with growing demand for wide-format printing, we can’t afford to miss a beat. That’s why we have enhanced our standard router with the new i-Cut® vision-enhanced cutting system made by MGE (Mikkelsen Graphic Engineering), the graphics industry standard for perfect print-to-cut registration.

Using sophisticated software, the i-Cut® Vision Pro and integrated i-Cut® camera record these non-uniform distortions around the perimeter of the image, automatically calculate a new set of optimized cutting curves for each particular sheet, and in a matter of seconds create the precise results required for perfection.

One operator can now do the work of three with razor sharp reliability and efficiency, eliminating much of the handwork previously required. Print runs from just one sheet to hundreds or even thousands are contour-cut to meet the most exacting standards. Setup times are minimal and multiple cut styles can be accomplished at one time. For instance, we can now cut using a knife blade, scoring wheel and router bit all at the same time, increasing efficiency and delivering great results faster and at lower cost than ever before possible.

It's like automated origami! Complete print finishing for that unique curve, pocket folder, or folded pop-up special effect. Recently acquired die-cutting technology allows DCI to offer greater cost savings, speed, and value to the entire printing solution.

As technology upgrades are implemented allowing us to print higher volumes at faster speeds, we needed a die-cutter that could keep pace. For that, we turned to one of the most sophisticated pieces of equipment of its kind in the world, the highly automated YAWA MW1050A. The new system delivers significantly higher performance, increasing our cutting capability from 2,000 sheets per hour to 5,500 at an incredible level of accuracy for sheet sizes up to 1,050mm x 750mm, at a significantly lower price. The YAWA's automated input and output means that it doesn't need to be stopped for loading and unloading, and quick-change for block stamps gives us the flexibility to change on a dime.

With this new dedicated cutting, stripping, and creasing system, we can deliver the ultimate in design customization for a limitless array of cut and folded products, such as pocket folders, 3-D door hangers, danglers, and tabletop displays. You name it, this baby cuts it, trims it, and creases it at an astonishing pace with the world's tightest precision.