XMPie, A Xerox Company, the leading provider of software for Individualized Communications Management (ICM) and pioneer of bridging print and digital media, will unveil Circle at drupa 2012. A cloud-based service designed to foster teamwork, XMPie Circle provides a visual language that enables all stakeholders in 1:1 multichannel campaigns to share concepts, agree on a blueprint, guide development, review and approve goals and touch points, and monitor analytics.

“1:1 multichannel campaigns—practiced by many leading customers of XMPie—bring exceptionally good results, yet too often brands resort to either mass-media or single-media personalization efforts. Such a choice is almost exclusively due to the chasm that exists between the brands and their service providers around 1:1 cross-media,” said Dr. Jacob Aizikowitz, president of XMPie. “We believe that Circle goes a long way to bridging this chasm, enabling brands, service providers and professionals to collaborate effectively. Such collaboration will make choosing 1:1 multichannel campaigns a broadly accepted practice, leading to better marketing and overall growth in our industry.”

Whereas today’s 1:1 software solutions focus on the campaign touch points (e.g. postcard, email, website) and ignore the linkage between them, XMPie Circle makes it possible to weave together the various touch points into one coherent story with a beginning, middle and end. Circle also allows for associating visual content with touch points, helping all the stakeholders to envision the intended campaign look and feel and see design options for various scenarios and segments.

Moreover, Circle uniquely enables the binding of touch points to XMPie media personalization systems for rendering of live, data-driven previews for a selected audience segment. This link between planning and execution makes the story not just an early conceptualization of the campaign idea, but rather a “meeting-room,” or “circle of knowledge and control.” Plus, Circle’s social, interactive nature even permits users to comment on the various campaign touch points or the storyboard as a whole, enriching the team experience, empowering the client, and revealing business expectations throughout the campaign evolution.

"Circle provides us with an unlimited "canvas in the cloud" where the campaign's story can be collaboratively created, previewed, refined, approved for execution, and measured," said Leon Schweppe, head of Digital at Callprint, a U.K.-based creative technology, print media production group and XMPie beta customer. "This has greatly improved the customer understanding of the process involved in building an effective campaign. Circle makes the collaboration much more clear and professional, which improves our multichannel sales cycle. The time saved can then be used on more strategic development of our relationships and technology proposition."

Christoph Grunicke, project/sales manager at TraffiC GmbH in Germany, also commented, “With its interactive campaign flow diagramming tools and contemporary, marketing-oriented user interface, Circle provides the perfect way to show your customers the possibilities of cross-media, and gives an image to your vision.”

Circle is not limited to XMPie users, does not require any software download or installation, and is easy-to-use by both beginners and cross-media experts alike. To help beginners get started quickly, XMPie has equipped Circle with sample campaign flow patterns for unlimited use by users. XMPie will also offer a free, feature-limited edition of Circle for basic campaign sketching, in addition to two premium editions with added capacity and extendibility.

“Our focus on creating a visual language for “telling” the campaign story was driven from realizing, through experience with our customers, the acute need for clarity between brands and their service providers,” said Ranen Goren, vice president of Product Innovation at XMPie. “Through our work with the Xerox Innovation Group and PODi, we leveraged this technology investment and introduced to Circle an extendable knowledge center that will help users view award-winning campaigns as “stories” – a valuable asset for expanded learning and practicing of 1:1 multichannel campaigns.”

XMPie Circle 1.0 will be on display in the XMPie booth adjacent to the Xerox stand in Hall 08b at drupa 2012, and available worldwide following the show. To join the latest conversations happening around drupa across social networks, follow @XMPie on Twitter and use #xeroxdrupa and #drupa. The show takes place May 3-16 in Düsseldorf, Germany.