Hello, my name is Jason Ellis; I’m the President of the EF Group out of San Antonio.  We are the marketing service provider arm of Accu Print which is a traditional print shop.  And I’m here tomorrow to kind of discuss how to move from it being a commercial print show into a marketing service provider. Kind of the road blocks you go through, some of the growing pains and you know, what some of the do’s and don’ts of how to make that transition successful.  

The EF Group right now, what we are really specializing in… we’re doing some really cool branded QR codes, so now instead of being kind of a one-stop print provider with design, now they can come in and we come up with a complete marketing solution for them.  So not only is print in there, we also have mobile applications that we’re building that is specialized for marketing.  One of our recent clients we did up post cards, posters, some point of sale material and we also had a branded QR code on there and a different one for each different place.  So with the mobile application they actually had a 65 percent increase in ticket sales that year.  So now we’re able to come to the table with a little bit more to offer than just, hey, I can print you some post cards for $.65 each.  

I think one of the most unique services we now offer is the branded QR codes.  I would show you my business card, but they’re like paintings.  And you have at 25 to 30 percent higher hit rate on those than your standard sort of black box everybody’s throwing out.  And we also now are creating mobile optimized websites for people, so when we go to the table, if they don’t just go, well I got a free QR code that goes to this website and when they’re there, there’s all this fluff and nobody finds what they’re looking for.  

So now we’re actually coming to the table doing branded QR codes, mobile optimized websites and some pretty sophisticated analytics on the back end using XMPI marketing consoles, we can actually go and prove results, prove investment and show them how successful the campaigns are as they’re running.  

Moving forward, we’re really kind of… really pushing the marketing service provider with printing as a back end.  So people can come to us, tell us their idea, what they’re trying to do and we can come up with some pretty creative solutions.  And a lot of that is based on these conferences that we go to and listening to a lot of different speakers and kind of getting an idea of what other people are doing what is successful for those people and therefore taking those ideas and integrating them with our clients and you know, them being really wowed because they’ve never heard of this technology or heard of these different marketing techniques and they’re really amazed at how successful they can be for them.