Today was the first full day at the Assoc of Chamber of Commerce Executives (ACCE) Convention at the Raleigh Convention Center. I was able to attend some great presentations on communication planning and social media that I’m going to write on in posts next week. I found that doing a tradeshow throws a kink in my challenge for a few reasons. First I was using my laptop to take notes on the speakers. After the morning sessions, the exhibits opened and I had to use my laptop to run the demo on the large monitor in our booth. Also between networking, demoing and returning calls I did not find the time to really sit down and write.

However I was able to see the reaction to my show giveaway and a clever promotion that I pulled together for Site Dynamics at ACCE. I had a small budget of under $400 to work with but needed to get a quantity of 1,000 items to put in the attendees show bags (approx 750) with some left over to giveaway at the booth. After searching the web for swag ideas I suddenly thought of doing a guitar pick with logo, web site and some slogan. I found out that it fit my budget and knew that it would be unique.

So I designed the pick below using an online tool that allowed me to upload my artwork and type set my slogan. I had a few days to get it done during the week of July 4th and have it shipped to the fulfillment house. There were a few glitches including shipping getting lost for a day but I got them there in time to be included in the show packages.

Now I know many exhibitors put a flyer to postcard or may a coupon or brochure but today I was assured by many booth visitors that the guitar pick was unusual and different in a good way. Many people commented that they either played or someone they knew played. But most important they remembered our name, stopped by the booth and saw a demo and entered into our giveaway drawing.

So I have a small 10 by 10 foot booth, table top display and demo station. Not very exciting so in order to tie in the pick I created a tabletop display showing our giveaway as the new Beatles Rockband video game. I also connected my iPod to the demo monitor that has speakers and cranked up Beatles tunes. Needless to say it worked. From a creative standpoint I was really happy since I met the challenge of budget and created a buzz in the space of the show that had results. I also used Twitter to promote using the conference hash tag #acce.

Writing about Web 2.0 technology over the past several months I am reminded of what the “new” technology was when I began my career and how it impacts us today. I graduated college in 1990 with a degree in communication and public relations. When I started college was already using computers for word processing and some basic programming. The computer at that time was a good tool but there wasn’t anything really cool until the Apple Macintosh came along with the first generation of PC based desktop publishing tools.

I purchased my first computer, a used Apple Mac for a whopping $2,500 and it was used and two years old! But hey it allowed me to start a career in desktop publishing which is what I did for the next few years. I spent most of my time learning about design and layout, pre-press technology and interfacing with various service providers and printers to deliver a finished, printed product. The various deliverables were newsletters, sales collateral, direct mail pieces, promos, stickers, giveaways, booklets, if you could put a logo on it I did that for my company using a Mac II and what is now called the Adobe Creative Suite. The only change is that PageMaker is now InDesign but the basic tools of Photoshop and Illustrator are still there.

The influence of desktop publishing was that it was a major shift in how companies and organizations developed and created their marketing communications. Prior to desktop publishing, producing communication involved more people to create and produce the image, especially for the commercial printers who employed two to three people for the job I was now doing on my computer. Also the marketing department had greater control of the finished product look and feel as well as the production schedule. We still had to get it to the printers at a certain time to get it printed but the time spent revising drafts was greatly reduced. Overall our cost per printed piece was reduced as we spent less money outsourcing production tasks to a printer, agency or pre-press specialist.

Now I must state that my experiences are more from the smaller company marketing department perspective. For most of my career I’ve worked in a department of three to five people and many times I’ve served as the entire marketing department, including now. I’ve done stints at agencies where I’ve been the outsourced resource for a large, multi-national company as well and had to justify my value if the client had a resource in house with similar skill set as mine. Most times it was dependent on time and not skill constraints.

With the growth of web sites and now social media technology what place does desktop publishing hold in today’s marketing? Why are we still producing printed collateral and business cards and other physical communication pieces? Well the answer is simple in that it’s part of the overall marketing mix and maintains the need for desktop publishing tools to produce collateral even if it’s a PDF download from the web site. The major shift is that the development of printed materials is less of a focus and priority for today’s marketing departments. We spend less money on printed materials and have better measurement on electronic communication that has a growing audience.

What influence did desktop publishing have on your career path and how much do you use it today?

I recently designed a new half-page ad and table top booth for Site Dynamics (http://www.sidyn.com/) a new site selection software provider. These materials were created for the IEDC show in Atlanta on Oct. 19, 2008.

Half-Page Ad (click on image to enlarge)

Booth (click on image to enlarge)