London Calling

We’re often asked what format and size of print are the most popular with different audiences and venues, so here’s what we found out.

Tom Butler investigates:

An interesting document arrived on my desk yesterday, it detailed every single piece of print that we’d taken out over the past 12 months. Initially I thought nothing of it, but once immersed in the facts it soon became clear of an emergent trend. We had more pieces of A5 print on display last year than all other sizes put together (DL, A6, etc). And we were looking at over 80 different sizes of print!

Now this is not to say there is a more effective size over the rest however. The sheer number and varieties of print we have successfully taken to market over the past year are mind blowing! If each piece of print was designed and coloured in the same way it would become mundane. So it’s this variety that keeps people interested.

But what does this variety mean!?! I hear you ask. Well I got to thinking, and in one sense it’s about familiarity and comfort. When a medium of marketing has worked so consistently well throughout the ages why would anyone veer away from it?

And yet in another sense, when a bold piece of print goes to market it creates that spark of recognition, that sense of excitement amongst an audience who know already they’re going to be entertained, fascinated and educated all at the same time.

Is this why print has become so endearingly popular? Is it because it’s visible? Is it because people think they’re getting a free guide when they should have paid? Is it because you can pick it up and put it in your bag? Is it because your going to mention it to your friends when you next see them? Well, amazingly, it’s all of the above.

So who is it that creates this raft of print in all shapes and sizes? Well research would suggest that it’s the traditional organisations, galleries and museums who produce the A5 print, film companies and contemporary organisations think up a postcard or something not seen before whilst the theatre world corners the market in concertina glitzy DL leaflets.

And in that sense, it’s also partly about brand recognition. Organisations are looking to develop a series of consistently designed pieces of print with the long term goal being for audiences to recognise the style and production of a leaflet in connection with the venue, exhibition or show.

So whilst the advent of Social Media has brought about a whole new raft of ways in which to reach your audience it brings a lovely sense of familiarity to see the multi-sized flyer defying the trends. In short, it’s become a core of organisations campaigns that shows no signs of slowing down for the foreseeable future.

Viva Print!

As we enter the last phase of our latest Social Media research project, Georgina Turner examines the ongoing blend between online and offline marketing…

By now you are riding a wave of Social Media and the water’s great, isn’t it? What’s even greater is that I have started to notice my personal favourite social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter, appearing on print campaigns for venues such as The Royal Institution and the V&A – a practice we’ve been big advocates for.

This got me to thinking, three years ago I carried out research for London Calling into the use of Print Media and how audiences respond to it,  and now in collaboration with students from the University of Northampton we are conducting research into the use of Social Media. So wasn’t it high time the two had a face-off? Was there a clear winner when communicating to your audiences?

The research highlights that it is a balancing act when getting the content of your print right. Selecting information and designing layouts can be a challenging task especially when one of your objectives is to reach new audiences who you don’t necessarily have a profile for. But once sitting proudly on display (in a London Calling Leaflet Rack, naturally) it would be nice to know why your print becomes that pocket takeaway.

Our results showed that 57% of visitors to our display racks are searching for offers, discounts and incentives. They pick up print for information on locations of venues and contact details including website addresses. But not just this, they want something to take home to show the folks like a form of memorabilia.

For Social Media, other than being extremely credible when delivered properly, when content is current you have the opportunity for two-way real-time conversations that are both sustainable and engaging. On Facebook, there are even tools enabling the audience to decide which conversations they view or follow – the fans or the ones belonging to an organisation. The brand can hear exactly what is being said about them, all while they are still in the room, and audiences can opt-in to listen and engage.

So, with round two and three in its mitts, Social Media shows that both B2C and B2B organisations can benefit from being active in Social Networks that give them added access to key audiences within their sector.

So, I thought I was onto my winner! “Ding, Ding!” However, going full circle to the beginning of my argument, it’s clear that Social Media has got to be considered as part of a well thought out and integrated marketing plan, and so we’re back to the rest of the mix again. And, crucially, remembering it really is a mix, not a simple silo of individual strategies and tactics.

“Marketplaces are conversations” is one of the key mantras of web marketing. What we’re learning is that physical print can play a crucial role in reaching new potential audiences and converting them into followers, fans and budding conversationalists.

Call it a draw? Call it what you like, I still love them both!

In anticipation of the AMA’s Digital Marketing Day next week, I’ve been getting to grips with the practicalities of internet marketing and its associated acronyms: SEM, SEO and SMO to name a few of my personal favourites, i.e. Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimisation and Social Media Optimisation respectively.

This got me thinking about something a lot of us marketers take for granted – the basics of print design.

Sure, there may be best practise guidelines and plenty of examples to hand (just check our racks if you need some new ideas) but what interests me here is how we can use these new digital lessons to revisit our other communications mediums and, for instance, re-imagine our approach to print within this broadening context.

Here then are some of my own thoughts on new approaches to print and how to optimise it’s affect as a vibrant part of a 21st century audience engagement strategy that includes digital, mobile and the whole marketing mix.

Include more than just your URL

It used to be enough to include a simple www.myvenuename.com URL on your print, but now  I’d argue that simply listing your URL is almost counterproductive. Audiences expect you to have a decent website, after all they all have one via facebook, twitter or even personally branded sites, so how much value does simply listing this really add?

Print display is an ideal way to reach new audiences, so we should be thinking of how best to add calls to action that will encourage people to jump online to where all the added value content is,whether it’s curatorial blogs, video trailers for forthcoming productions or even just foregrounding the 3 clicks & You’re Booked benefits of a new online box office system.

Sell the experience

If online is trackable down to the last pay-per-click, then is modern print shifting to a more experiential model? Now that people are as likely to find you via search, land where they like on your site then navigate around by themselves, there can be real value in reconsidering how you want people to engage differently with your printed material.

Returning to the idea of Prestige Format print, what are the added advantages of being able to directly influence the journey people take as they browse your brochure? Are there ways you can look to make your content more immersive? What can we learn from the ways people browse magazines, newspaper or even books. Does your print have a throughline, something that foregrounds the wider experience of your venue or production? What stories can you tell that go beyond the usual mix of production copy, pull-quotes and how to find us information.

Offer multiple ways to engage

Our research shows that offering new ways for people to engage with you can help foster a more modern & up to date impression in the eyes of both new and existing audiences. For instance including SMS short codes on posters and print has been popular for a number of years and is increasingly catching on in our sector. However there’s still a need to tailor the offer to your audience.

Downloadable mobile wallpaper and similar content might be great for fans of blockbuster movies, and I’d count myself in that demographic, but I’m still looking for more from my friendly neighbourhood arts venue. Instead, are there vouchers I can text in for and use at the bar, can I sign up to controlled text message alerts that update me on the added programme around a main exhibition or even for the price of my original text message (perhaps tailored to a one-off premium charge) can I sign up to a new cheaper but more flexible mobile membership scheme with your venue?

Think about sustainability

Audiences are demanding, and we’re seeing mounting evidence that arts audiences are also highly likely to be engaged with broader cultural concerns like climate change. If you’ve not greened your print yet, then the costs of doing so are now highly competitive as more printers are appreciating the added business benefits of using vegetable inks and sustainable paper stocks. If your print is as sustainable as you can make it, is there more you could do to highlight this to audiences and communicate other green initiatives your organisation is working on?

Could you include especially selected pre-show dinner offers with sustainable restaurants, highlight the new selection of organic drinks and snacks in your bar or restaurant or, given that one of the largest parts of our sector’s carbon footprint comes from travel to and from a venue, partner with a friendly carbon-neutral taxi company?

I spend a lot of time thinking about print in one form or another and, whether it’s meetings with clients, planning campaigns, researching different audience segments or just sitting in a bar with friends and watching how people approach our racks, one thought comes through loud and clear.

People love print.

Note, I didn’t necessarily say financial directors, front of house staff or even marketers, just people. Oh, and before this starts to come across as a digital marketing versus trad marketing screed of some kind, let me also say I love my iPhone, am hooked on Twitter and buy a load of stuff online (including tickets) like everyone else.

And none of this means that print, and our relationships to it, isn’t changing.

Because I’m fascinated by evolution, I like to talk a lot about how the marketing mix functions as an ecosystem and how, like everything else, print evolves.

Evolution is slow, difficult to spot in the field and, crucially, not a conscious process, so adaptations that might seem entirely sensible to intelligent designers are often lost in favour of seemingly counter-intuitive but highly efficient solutions that work just fine in the real world.

For example, given the flexibility of modern websites to create new pages and update content in real time versus the predetermined size, page count and word limits of brochures, it would make sense that marketers would shift to a quicker, cheaper and more efficient flyer or postcard format with a simple call to action. The obvious tactic being to nimbly attract people’s interest then encourage them online as swiftly as possible so they land where all the good stuff is.

It makes sense in a tactical kind of way, and there’s likely all kinds of efficiencies involved, however looking at the print display campaigns we manage, and the trends over time, I’m starting to recognise the beginnings of a different pattern.

In simple terms, I’ve started to think of this emergent trend as a shift towards what I’ve called prestige format print.

Prestige print is an approach to design and content that eschews the lowest cost to highest content ratio of many brochures in favour of investing in a deliberately high quality product that enhances the reading experience.

Quick examples of prestige print would include an investment in higher quality print stocks, value-added copy such as Q&A’s with artists, and a design process that favours open white spaces mixed in with text and often devotes whole pages to single unadorned images.

The aim is to deliver an artifact with lasting value. A piece of print that wouldn’t look out of place on a coffee table, serves as a direct statement of your own interest in innovative arts culture and encourages repeat readings over a simple short-term browse and bin.

Now that the web is the default destination for information on demand, perhaps print is changing to meet a different set of audience expectations and satisfying a need for a more lasting and tangible engagement with modern venues. One that runs in parallel with the way we engage with our audiences online.

Today is the three week countdown to the Arts Marketing Association’s Digital Marketing Day, for which London Calling is the proud headline sponsor.

Following on from the theme of sponsorship in my last post, and given the fact some may note a slight incongruity in a digital marketing event being sponsored by a company best known as a provider of print display, it seemed highly timely to offer some insight into exactly why we think there’s such a big connection between our work taking print out on the road and the new opportunities to be found on the good old information superhighway.

The first time I really started thinking about the effect of digital media on the modern marketing mix was back in the last millennium – 1999 BB (Before Broadband) to be precise – and I was working  box office and communications at The Junction in Cambridge.

I’m paraphrasing slightly, but the basic tide of popular opinion back then went something like this:

“In a couple of years time we won’t need to print any more season brochures because people will simply go online and print them off themselves at home.”

Now, I’ll add a big caveat here and say this wasn’t necessarily the opinion from the marketing team, but it was certainly a trending topic of the day and the first time I encountered the so-called Death-Of-Print concept. And, as something that I’ve been encountering on and off ever since, it seemed a suitable topic for discussion here.

London Calling is  a company built with print marketing at its heart, so you can see how we might think it a good idea to take this kind of talk seriously. The thing is though the predicted trends aren’t bearing out. In fact with the internet breaking, mutating and re-paradigming established business models all over the place, any kind of long distance prognostication is proving a tad hard for people.

Instead let’s focus on what we do know. Change is definitely happening. Conversation has toppled content as online king, and the way we consume and share information is radically shifting our traditional marketing models; or, as some prefer, giving us a more insightful understanding into how those same models actually worked all along.

The question for us is where does a company like London Calling fit within this realignment of priorities? Do we want to stay at the centre of the mix, or are there new perspectives to be gained from experimenting on the edges?

The answer is most likely a combination of the two, but it’s the details of that potential mix that most fascinate us and have led us to trialling new digital products of our own and, ultimately, investing in conference events like this in support of both our own development and that of our clients.

The prediction about everyone home-printing their own brochures may have failed to materialise – hardly surprising given the cost of printer ink compared to pretty much everything else – and in fact London Calling has seen volumes increase year on year, which can be a different kind of concern, and one of the reasons that’s lead to all of our recent sustainability initiatives. However the shared world of marketing, communications and advertising can be a highly sensitive ecosystem, and we’ve all heard that story about what happens when even a single butterfly flaps its wings.

In anticipation of the Digital Marketing Day it seemed fitting to use this blog space in the coming weeks to explore the recent work we have done under the banner of London Calling Digital. Sharing our own learning experiences – the good, the bad, and the error 404s – and offer our own two-cents on the ways print, digital and now locative media may begin to interact in the future.

In my humble opinion it’s a fascinating time to be a marketer, and the levels of expertise, initiative and enthusiasm we’re seeing across the arts to engage meaningfully with their audiences suggests the need to experiment and share our knowledge has never been so timely.

*I was originally going to put ‘Before Google,’ but they first launched in 1998 (to no fanfare whatsoever, which just goes to show how people fail to pay attention to the really important things).

You want to encourage new student audiences. Everyone wants to reach student audiences, and every year there’s a perfect opportunity in the form of the ever popular Freshers Fair. But you also need to cut through the chatter, because there’s a lot of different social options being promoted out there so how do you do it?

One of the immediate answers is collaboration. After all, first and foremost you’re promoting the arts experience and encouraging an audience often unfamiliar with the city to take their first steps out further than the union bar; and it’s often those first, formative visits that can build continued loyalty and resonate for years to come. A shared message – there’s a wealth of art in London – can also create a greater sense of cultural value. You’re not just visiting a venue you’re participating in a rich cultural and contemporary heritage.

Last week London Calling went back to university as part of a shared promotional effort by some of the capital’s finest Galleries and Museums, all keen to engage new student audiences at the start of their first term.

We were originally approached by the Art in London group to coordinate the creation of their bespoke information packs, handle the logistics of delivery and, most importantly, manage the assembly of multiple pieces of promotional print into one simple package that could easily be handed out all in one go.

As a little extra bonus we also made sure that all of the packs were made from 100% recycled paper stock and printed using sustainable vegetable inks while still coming in on budget. Another small step on the path to showing that green print needn’t cost the Earth.

The packs were distributed to students from the Art in London tables at Freshers Fairs taking place at Goldsmiths, UCL, the University of the Arts and University of London with gallery reps on hand to answer questions and sign students up to a shared emailing list.

While we had originally planned to go back and collect any remaining supplies, the teams did so well each day that there wasn’t a single pack left over by the end of the campaign.

What did we learn? Clearly there’s as big a demand for arts information amongst student audiences as ever, and perhaps the real trick to engaging with them successfully is in taking the extra time to consider the context of the message you want to present.

By teaming up the Art in London group were able to create a simple but powerful proposition that combined messages from 17 different cultural venues into a single call to action that added value way beyond the sum of its collective parts.

Here’s  a rare picture of a stocked up and ready to roll table, crush of art-loving students just out of shot…

How We Work

Creating a print display campaign is a collaborative process. Our aim is to work closely with you to suggest the best possible combination of our services to reach your audiences and promote your events.

What We Ask

The easiest way to get started on a campaign brief is to consider the Five Ws (and one H).

• What type of event are you promoting and where is it happening? The foundation of your campaign.
• Who are you trying to reach and why? This helps us match our runs to your target audiences.
• When are the start and end dates? Useful for determining the duration of your print display and how best to weight the coverage.
• How many pages or panels thick is your print? We use this to determine how many copies we can place in each rack and holder.
• What does your print look like? Being able to see an advance copy of the print can often help us make better recommendations and more focused campaigns.

With this information in hand we will work with you to create a proposal tailored to the specific goals of your campaign and get your print out on display…

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