Whenever one reads a printing magazine these days the word transpromo is increasingly being seen. This is shown by a recent article covering a recent report by the UK direct mail group Dsi CMM stated that in the UK advertisers are missing out on a UK Pound half billion opportunity by not placing marketing on bills and statements. Figures it released showed a total of UK Pound 502 million on advertising space on bills lies unused in the UK every year. This amounts to 3% of UK annual media spend and 22% of annual UK direct mail spend. To break this down further they showed the banking sector missed out on UK Pound 194 million of space, credit cards UK Pound 159 million, mobile phone providers UK Pound 80 million, and loyalty cards UK Pound 19 million. Dsi CMM said print could claw that amount back with highly targeted ‘transpromo’ messages. (I personally think these comments are a little ridiculous and I explain why later in this article). Such targeted marketing is specifically targeted advertising based upon a recipient’s interests.

Recently the CEO of social networking Internet site Facebook indicated that his company planned to launch targeted advertising at Facebook users utilizing the information these users had entered in their Facebook entries. Such targeted advertising may be new in this Internet area, but it is something printers have been increasingly doing with variable data printing in this industry. What it shows however is that targeted marketing aimed at a recipients interests is becoming better understood.

"In the high end of the production color market increased print volume growth of more than 60 percent is projected,” said Charles A. Pesko, Managing Director, InfoTrends, a leading market research company. “A recent study by this company, The Future of Mail 2006: Direct Mail, Transaction, and “Transpromotional” Documents predicted a cumulative annual growth through 2010 for transpromotional documents of 91%. This sounds huge but in reality it is not too difficult when you start from the very small base that we have at present.