The problem: increasing productivity without spending a fortune or upsetting the status quo.

One solution: an online scratchcard promotion

We’ve developed an online promotional scratchcard system that fits the criteria to a “T”. Scratchcards can be delivered via e-mail or a web page link and have the same promotional benefits and user enjoyment as a printed one yet cost significantly less (and are less messy!).

The game can be completely personalised and branded so they make an ideal way to broadcast internal messages.

People do like a scratchcard – it’s to do with the interactivity – and the chance of winning something. So, using an online scratchcard promotion to motivate your staff increases the likelihood of a successful result.

You can try our promotion for nothing to see how it works – the main prize is a free promotion so you could end up getting yours for nothing. Give it a go>>

For more information on how it works >>

A few ideas for using them:

• Incentivise your sales force
• Say “Thank you” to your employees
• Transmit corporate messages in an entertaining and involving way
• Motivate employees to become stakeholders

Because of this we receive many more enquires than orders – so now we’ve developed a promotional scratchcard system that can be played online. And can be delivered at a fraction of the cost of a conventional printed scratchcard.

A promotion can be delivered to your target via a link on your website or in an e-mail and can be used for any number of things:

• target new business prospects
• remind lapsed customers of your existence
• incentivise your staff
• promote a new product or service
• boost traffic to your website

The promotion can be fully branded and customised to reflect your brand values and design themes.
Read more

Maris runs the St Maria Goretti school in Nigeria and  has recently returned from a cultural school trip to the UK. She needs to produce a memorial brochure for parents and children but there’s a catch: the printed brochures need to be in Lagos by the following Friday. Producing a brochure within a week in the UK is not terribly difficult but we know from previous experience there’s a major transport issue, delivering material to Nigeria.

Before making any sort of decision, I need to see what we’re dealing with so Maria e-mails a draft of the proposed brochure in Word. On the face of it, it all looks reasonable straightforward but I need to check transport before commiting – and that can’t be done until first thing Monday.

And Monday is the 5th day of the Lord’s test with every chance of England beating Australia at Lord’s for the first time in years so I can’t miss that. The stewards at Lord’s are very hot on mobile phones so it’s back and forth between seat and the back of the grandstand making calls, trying to resolve the transport issue. Doesn’t look good when it becomes apparent that the brochures would need to be at Heathrow by tonight to clear Lagos customs in time for Friday delivery.

But what are friends for? Another of our Nigerian clients, Rockson Engineering, has a private plane leaving on Wednesday afternoon – if we can deliver brochures to Kensington by 3pm they’ll take them for us. Game on.

Fortunately Freddie destroys the Aussie resistance and it’s all over by lunch – shame in a way, as the atmosphere at Lord’s was simply fantastic.

Back to the office, and by early evening a draft design is on its way to Nigeria. A few corrections and tweaks on Tuesday morning, and by early afternoon we have approval and the PDFs are en route to the factory.

Sterling work by Prometheus to print the brochure overnight and have sheets drying on the floor by breakfast in time for folding and stitching. By midday transport is on its way to collect and deliver safely to Kensington (with a few minutes to spare!).

Late on Thursday I have a call from a very happy Maria.

Static html pages

How the web began. At the basic level, each page has a single file with the text and formatting, and instructions on what to do with any images or links. Created with desk top software such as Dreamweaver, static pages, until recently, have required a degree of technical knowledge to design and link together to create a site. A degree of client-editing is now possible with Adobe Contribute but, realistically, structural changes and mass text and picture updates are not to be taken on lightly without a decent grasp of the technical limitations and SEO requirements.

Content Management Systems

Available in a multitude of flavours from the very expensive to the free, Content Management Systems (CMS), on the face of it, sound like the answer to many prayers. But…

Open source software such as Joomla and Drupal is available at no cost but they do have very steep learning curves. Built on top of a database, CMS allows articles to be written and linked together without any html or web design knowledge. No pages actually exist. Each time a browser calls for a page, the CMS interogates the database and builds the page on-the-fly. Fantastic for editability, not so good (out-of-the-box) for important things like design and search engine optimisation (SEO).

At the time of writing, Wordpress is better for blogging although the development path is tending towards CMS.

Static Site Pros & Cons

PROS

• Easy to maintain
• Much more design freedom
• Relatively simple to get good search engine listing results
• Nice, logical file names
• Suits smaller sites where info remains relatively constant
• Fast loading pages

CONS

• Need to buy software to be able to update pages
• Less flexible than CMS
• Can be difficult to integrate add-ons
• Less scalable than CMS

Dynamic Site Pros & Cons

PROS

• “Free” – open source software with masses of plug-ins and extensions
• Easy for non-techs to add material through a browser interface
• Infrastructure can support massive sites
• Relatively easy to alter the site structure (but not without impacting badly on your SEO unless you’re careful)

CONS

• More restrictive in terms of design
• Requires regular software updates that can be a pain to install
• Generally less secure than a static site
• Harder to secure the site against malicious attack
• Harder to get good SEO results
• Slower loading pages

In November of this year we’ll be celebrating our 20th birthday. Having been born out of the last recession we reckon it’s as tough now as it’s ever been – particularly when it comes to acquiring new business so time for a light-hearted look at our search for the NHA Unique Selling Proposition – the Holy Grail of new business.

First up a bit of background: Like many in the service industries we’ve always had a particular problem describing exactly what we do – we operate in so many areas and use so many different skills and experiences for any given project that describing the NHA Service in a word or two has proved very difficult. Yes, we’re designers; Yes, we’re printers; Yes, we’re copywriters; and so it goes on.

When you make a new business approach in whatever form, the majority of prospects will try to pigeon-hole you in a suitable category to make the proposition easier to understand – something that ties in with the way they work. To begin with it was relatively straightforward: we were a below-the line agency handling just about everything to do with marketing (except press, tv and radio). We concentrated on designing and producing brochures and other marketing material with the odd promotion, point-of-sale item and premium thrown in. Printers were still perceived like devils-incarnate and service was a dirty word.

We used freelance designers, copywriters, photographers and any other skills required, pulled the whole project together in one package and then bought the repro (remember repro and typesetting?) and print to deliver a complete package to the client. Our USP then was, what has now become a much-maligned phrase “The One-Stop Shop”.

Then “below-the-line” became increasingly irrelevant as a phrase: Sales Promotion agencies appeared; designers started buying print; printers started giving away design and providing a decent service; typesetting disappeared completely (together with the absurd union practices of the time – NGA sticker anyone?) and everyone started treading on each other’s toes, blurring the distinction between the various skills.

Around the mid-90s we didn’t want to be perceived as “just” designers or “just” this or “just” that as the service NHA provides is much more comprehensive and experienced than that. So we muddled along without a USP and really struggled to promote exactly why NHA was a better bet for that project than the local designer, for example – our proposition was too complicated to be easily communicated and so the new business efforts fell on stony ground. We tried telesales, direct mail, cold calling and all the standard stuff, with very little to show for it.

Come the Millennium and fortunately our computers continued to work, unfortunately the lack of a USP and clear sales message didn’t. We interrogated clients (well… fed and watered them ‘til their defences were down) to try and identify what “they” thought we were and how “they” perceived us rather than what “we” thought we were. Some thought of us as Designers, some as Printers, others as a soft touch for lunch! There was no consensus but the conclusion we did draw was that our clients didn’t really know how to categorise our services either – and us a communications company.

After plenty more discussion and exploration we became “Creative Project Managers” – described beautifully what we do, provided one didn’t immediately relate project management with the building industry.

Despite all of these shenanigans, our best source of new business over the years has been, unsurprisingly, personal introductions or recommendations from existing clients. This is true for almost every industry for one very simple reason: you don’t have to win someone’s trust “before” they give you the business – unless you turn out to be a complete idiot. A personal recommendation brings with it a level of trust: “if you’ve done a good job for my friend/colleague or whatever then I know you’ll do the same for me.”

And so the search for the definitive USP continues.

Any suggestions will be gratefully received…

Scratchcards or Scratch Cards?

Why Scratchcards?

1. Interactivity: for a start people just love them; give someone a scratchcard and they’ll have the latex off before you can blink, especially with the added frisson of winning something for nothing.
2. Memorability: interactivity provides an attractive bonus in the form of memorability. People just appear to be better able to remember a promotion/brand when they’ve had do something mechanical
3. Adaptability: with nothing coming “off the shelf” the game, the design and everything else can be tuned to provide a completely personalised promotion to support any marketing activity you like and enhance brand values.

They’re Cheaper than ever

Historically small print runs of just a couple of thousand cards have looked disproportionally expensive. There are three separate processes involved, each with its own minimum charge, so economies of scale didn’t kick in until you produced 5000 or so cards.

The introduction of more modern machinery and techniques has seen the production costs fall so that the minimum cost is now getting on for half what it was ten years ago.

Nowadays you can have your own personalised scratchcard promotion, with a game tailored to your exact needs for well under £1000.

Well here’s a good place

I’m discussing short runs of between 1,000 and 50,000 copies in this article as once you get into much bigger quantities the machinery required to produce them economically requires a different approach.

Size

Anything you want!

In real life A6 (148 x 105mm) and A5 (148 x 210mm) are the most popular sizes, entirely due to economics. The cards are printed on sheets that are multiples of the basic A4 size so there’s less wastage with these sizes.

Colours

Anything you want!

Again, real life normally limits this to the hundreds of thousands of shades available with 4 process colours but if you really must have a lurid lime green or “that” particular pastel colour then any printable colour is available.

The most common combination is to have full colour (from the process colours) on one side and then just black on the back for the dreaded Ts & Cs.

The Game

Nearly all games are derived from a very simple “match the pictures” formula. This is ideally suited to promotional cards as brand values can be enhanced by using the product itself.

For example, we produced a batch of cards for Eurofighter to be used at the Farnborough and Berlin air shows and the game featured a series of different pictures of the plane itself so it didn’t matter which scratch-off was removed there was always a pic of the plane waiting underneath.

Exactly the same idea can be used whether you’re promoting a bar (match the bottles anybody?) or a comedy festival.

Winners and Losers

As the cards are printed on much larger sheets, the relative quantities of winning and losing cards can be carefully controlled and monitored. Cards can be either randomly shuffled together or kept separate.

Terms and Conditions

These follow a formula: “The British Code of Advertising and Sales Promotion” established by the Advertising Standards Authority. Apart from restrictions on what you can and can’t promote to children, there are two broad categories: with or without a required purchase.

Once we know which category the promotion falls within it’s out with the boilerplate and time to fill in the gaps so it’s not something you really need to worry about as we can lead you through the whole process.

And that’s about all there is to it!

Catalogue design? Yes

Copywriting, photography and print production? Yes

Web site design and maintenance? Yes

Experienced enough to know what we’re talking about? Yes

Experience across a range of industries? Yes

Worth a call? Definitely – 020 7436 3565

Visit www.nha.co.uk

The catalogue, designed this time round by the French agency, featured a special metallic gold as the overall background colour which needed to be printed as a fifth colour. Nothing particularly unusual about that and something we’ve seen many times in the past.

The digital proofs all looked fine and were approved with barely a tweak and all looked rosey. Until…

Two days after 60,000 copies had been delivered – and well-received by the client (and four days after the final sheets were printed) a strange “shadow” appeared on some of the pages. First reaction was that it must be set-off – the result of wet sheets sitting on top of each other and the image transferring from one sheet to the one above. But, on closer inspection, the “shadows” didn’t match anything as obvious as that so it couldn’t be set-off.

After a bit of judicious “wiggling under a light” and “holding it up to the window” to get a better view we realised it was the outline of the image on the other side of the sheet.

Lots of: “What?” “How can that be?” and “I’ve never seen that before.”

After a deal of sleuthing we identified the cause as a very rare issue called “gas ghosting”. We’d never heard of it but it turns out to be a chemical reaction associated with designs that call for heavy coverage of metallic inks whereby the ink on the opposite side of the sheet is prevented from drying in the conventional way because of a combination of the sealer varnish and the metallic ink.

It takes a day or two to kick in and then reduces over time. And there’s no known solution – apart from changing the design.

Even had there been time to reprint the catalogue without jeopardising the entire Christmas sales period we would have achieved much the same result.

You might think that leaving the sheets to dry between coats was an option but:

• The gold was such an integral part of the background that printing the 4 process colours, allowing the sheet to dry and then adding the gold wouldn’t work because the registration problems would be impossible.
• Similarly, printing all 5 colours and then leaving it to dry before adding the sealer varnish wouldn’t work because there’s no way of running a sheet with lots of solid metallic ink on it through the press without the surface being marked by the press rollers.

All we could do in the end was negotiate a discount and bear it in mind for the future.

Mind you, despite the amount of energy and anxiety expended by us, the client and the printers, not a single customer commented on it.

The two serve quite different purposes and need to be treated as such if the resultant product is going to be anywhere near meeting its targets.

Wikipedia describes a catalogue (or catalog) as “an organized, detailed, descriptive list of items arranged systematically….. The word comes from the Hesiodic Catalogue of Women or Eoiae.” And a brochure, rather less grandly as “a leaflet advertisement. Brochures may advertise locations, events, hotels, products, services, etc.”

For normal human beings that translates to catalogues (usually) want to sell you one or more products from a whole list of goodies with prices while a brochure is more of a touchy-feely marketing tool – and if any smarty-pants asks why holiday “brochures” are called brochures and NOT catalogues I shall summon dark forces to make your tea go cold.

Does it matter?

In design terms it is massively important. Catalogue design, particularly if you’re selling off the page is far more of a science than you might imagine.

For a catalogue to achieve its full potential, you’d be wasting your time without an understanding of square inch analysis and product density; knowing where the important “hot spots” are; understanding how to change the pace at which a reader is scanning the catalogue with “stoppers”; how to use “heroes”, and so on and so on.

A brochure is less scientific but no less important for all that. Without the need to achieve specific performance (in terms of sales) from a given area or number of pages, a brochure provides more scope to explore other areas of creativity.

Having said all that the most important consideration for a designer is understanding the difference in such a way that they can produce the best possible designs for any given application.