PODi 2011 Best Practices Award Winners Announced

Annual competition for outstanding innovation in digital printing honors best applications for Direct Marketing, Marketing Resource Centers, and Self-Promotion
Rochester, NY — January 4, 2011— PODi, the Digital Printing Initiative, has announced the 2011 winners of the PODi Best Practices Awards for digital printing. These prestigious awards recognize outstanding examples of digital printing and relevant marketing strategies. The winners will present their campaigns and receive their awards at the AppForum digital printing and direct marketing conference, http://www.AppForum.org January 31 – February 2, 2011 at the Mirage Hotel in Las Vegas. AppForum attendees will enjoy a detailed look at the applications and a chance to hear the inside stories.
PODi accepts case studies for the Best Practices Award competition throughout the year, and entries are judged on a combination of criteria, including measured results, value proposition, functionality, scalability, relevance, creativity, and innovation. The 2011 Panel of distinguished judges:
• Howie Fenton, Senior Technical Consultant, NAPL
• Dr. John Leininger, Professor Department of Graphic Communications, Clemson University
• Cary Sherburne, journalist, author, marketing consultant, and WhatTheyThink Senior Editor
• Jim Olsen, President, Imagination Ink

Best Practices Winner: Direct Marketing Category
Chick-fil-A and Dukky – “Chick-fil-A Increases Store Traffic”
An impressive example of a fully integrated multichannel direct marketing campaign with viral components that upped visit rates to over 279% and response rates to 120.6% easily took top honors in its category. The Chick-fil-A program featured direct mail postcards that drove recipients to personalized landing pages where they answered survey questions and activated coupons. They could then enter a sweepstakes by sharing the offer with friends through social networks, email, and SMS. This campaign provided a wealth of information to Chick-fil-A about their customers, including what media channels they use.
“Dukky is proud to work with clients like Chick-fil-A who are looking for innovative and interactive solutions in their marketing. Our ability to challenge standard response rates and outcomes by capturing the power of word-of-mouth marketing through Viral Peer Sharing is redefining expectations in our clients' campaigns,” says Renee Hall, Dukky’s VP of Business Development. “To be recognized by such a prestigious organization as PODi due to the response and redemption rates our platform allows is an honor for both Dukky and our clients.”
Honorable Mentions (tie): Rosemont College, Pacesetter Enterprises, and Digital Innovations Group – “Rosemont College Increases Fund Donations” / Oakland University and SugarBush Media Solutions – “Oakland Univ. Promotes Summer Program with Comprehensive Cross-Media Campaign”
Best Practices Winner: Marketing Resource Center Category
Mercury Marine and Pinpoint-360 – “Mercury Online Marketing Dealer Network Solution”
Marketing portals continue to be a vital solution for controlling brand and producing collateral materials for local and regional dealers or franchisees. This solution, which services 4500 Mercury marine engine dealers, a participation rate of over 77%, is a prime example of the stunning results a well-designed portal can achieve. With the Mercury Online Marketing portal, dealers can now select and customize numerous marketing products including print ads, direct mail postcards, sale sheets, billboards, and more.

“Having the ability to offer stronger, more effective creative has given our dealer network the opportunity to build their own communications programs, while allowing Mercury Marine to maintain and manage brand integrity,” says Jon Mathews, Global Brand Manager for Mercury Marine. ”Dealer involvement has been amazing.” Pinpoint-360 Principal, Bob Purtell says, “Our web-to-print platform, Pinpoint Direct was developed to provide clients with multi-channeled marketing solutions that exceed their expectations. We’re proud to receive the PODi Best Practices Award, and we thank Mercury Marine for their vision and collaborative efforts on this program.”
Honorable Mention: Dermalogica SA and Remata Communications – “Dermalogica Supports Stockists with Web-to-Print Solution”

Best Practices Winner: Self-Promotion Category
Boelte-Hall – “Boelte-Hall Drives Customer Leads”
The great thing about this cross-media self-promotion program is how easily it can translate into a similar campaign for Boelte-Hall’s corporate customers. The clever demonstration of cross-channel marketing tools, like direct mail, surveys, Personalized urls, and email, used together to drive traffic to a trade show booth, is a winning concept. This program also clearly shows the importance of an outstanding offer. The architecture, execution, and results (over 12% response rate and 25 hot leads) combined to make this campaign a winner.
Boelte-Hall CEO, Steve Hall says, "This award validates a lot of hard work by Boelte-Hall folks who continuously stretch themselves to find new ways to help customers reach their audience. In this case, we were our own customer and we proved cross-media marketing even works for us! It is an honor to have our work recognized by a cutting edge organization like PODi."
Honorable Mention: AlphaGraphics Cary – “AlphaGraphics Wins the Day with Super Heroes Campaign”

The first edition of 2011 PODi case studies, including all the award winners, has recently been added to the Case Study Database. These 27 case studies cover eight vertical markets and four different business applications. The second edition will be published this spring. The PODi Case Study Database is the only collection of its kind for the digital print marketplace. Access to over 450 case studies and reports is free to PODi members at www.podi.org.
Submit your case study for 2012 Best Practice Awards. For more information or to register for the 2011 AppForum, visit www.appforum.org.
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About the AppForum
The annual three-day AppForum is the only industry conference dedicated exclusively to marketing applications powered by digital print, with a truly independent, vendor-neutral, unbiased agenda. All of PODi’s extensive research, resources, industry contacts, and expertise come together once a year to make the AppForum the cornerstone of what’s new and what’s next in digital applications.
Print service providers and marketing experts learn the latest trends in one-to-one and relevant marketing, new profitable applications, and sales strategies. Thought-provoking sessions tackle a wide variety of application technologies. The diverse audience of printing and marketing professionals, end users, technology experts and others make the AppForum a dynamic networking opportunity.
About PODi
PODi (www.podi.org) is a vendor neutral industry initiative with hundreds of member companies, including Executive Board members EFI, HP, Pitney Bowes and Xerox. The organization’s goal is to drive demand for marketing applications powered by digital print & help members build successful digital print businesses.
About Caslon
Caslon (www.caslon.net) helps companies leverage rapidly advancing digital technologies, especially digital printing. Since 1998, Caslon has been the international Affiliate of PODi, the Digital Printing Initiative. Caslon provides top-level services for the PODi organization, including managing the annual PODi AppForum.

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This release was published on openPR.