Attendees Learn How to “Rocket to Success” with Cross Media Solution

The XMPie Users Group held its second annual users group conference at Planet Hollywood in Las Vegas in early February.  Nearly 200 users from more than 80 companies attended this year’s conference, which was sponsored by key industry vendors, including Adobe, EFI, HP, Kodak, PB Systems, Press-sense, Tecra, Xerox and XMPie.

The conference featured a keynote address from Donovan Neale-May, CEO of the CMO Council, who spoke about the needs of the Chief Marketing Officer in today’s marketplace, especially as it relates to the power of personalization in enhancing customer communications. Diana Klug, Director of Marketing for Boeing and an XMPie user, shared Boeing’s perspective on the importance of cross-media communications, talking about the high-value, very highly customized marketing collateral the company is producing for its aircraft customers using XMPie solutions. And InfoTrends’ Barbara Pellow shared a perspective on the Future of Mail based on recent InfoTrends research that reflects, among other things, the preference on the part of individuals to receive relevant, personalized direct marketing and other materials as opposed to mass mailings that have no relevance to them.

Always a high point at the conference is the XMPie product roadmap presentation that outlines for users what progress the company has made in the last year, and where it will go from here.  High on the interest list for attendees were enhancements to uStore, XMPie’s web-enabled storefront solution, and the introduction of uProduce Marketing Console, which XMPie President Jacob Aizikowitz described as having the ability to revolutionize marketing as we know it.  He said, “We are entering an era where the integration of the marketing and publishing disciplines is the next frontier. Solutions that allow service providers and their marketing customers to share a marketing view of variable data cross-media campaigns are highly valuable. Such integration bridges the marketing/publishing gap, especially with respect to print, and it brings the real-time response and analysis that are so common to new media into the world of integrated cross-media.”

This year’s conference featured three tracks:  a design track, a programming track and a marketing track.  “This structure helped us better address the needs of the wide range of users who attend our conference,” said Stefan Agustsson, President of the XMPie Users Group and Vice President at Yoffi Digital.  “We received very positive feedback about these three tracks, and the learning opportunities the conference provided.  In fact, 100% of members who came to the conference this year and responded to our post-conference survey told us that the conference met their expectations, and that they would recommend this conference to other users.  That is a huge success by anyone’s measure.” The group was evenly split among programmers, designers and those with a marketing interest.

I was especially pleased with the energy level demonstrated by User Group members, and the level of interactivity that was evident in all of the sessions.  These folks were there to learn, and their businesses are already delivering a wide range of innovative, leading edge cross-media services for their customers.  Another highlight of the conference was the “Best of the Best” contest, which had 11 entries from companies around the world and gave them an opportunity to be recognized for their work in cross-media.  Watch for an article coming soon on WhatTheyThink from Barbara Pellow discussing the contest submissions in detail.

“Another addition to this year’s conference,” added Agustsson, “were pre-conference technical tutorials for design and programming.  Half of attendees took advantage of those tutorials as well.”

From my perspective, attendees left the conference with a wealth of information, including an informative XMPie white paper on how cross-media fits into the new world of marketing, plenty of good examples from presenters and peers relative to innovative implementations of cross-media publishing, and gigabytes of information for later download from the Users Group site, that includes all of the presentations, video demonstrations of the ever-popular uImage solution for unique presentation of variable information, application examples they can use in their own businesses including XMPie’s holiday calendar, and lots of programming code for those more technically inclined.