ARTICLE

Creative Futures: A New Way of Working Together With Brands

Creative Futures, an industry-wide campaign from Canon and The Drum, brings together experts from across the print supply chain to reimagine future collaboration with brands.
Image representing a state-of-the-art knowledge sharing experience - Creative Futures

A state-of-the-art knowledge sharing experience

With a joint ambition to provide the best omnichannel customer experience, the Creative Futures project is driven by a dedicated team of experts with individual expertise in technology, data, creative and measurement to explore how new approaches to collaboration can enable greater opportunities for digital transformation in promotional customer communication in print, as part of the wider channel mix.

Creative Futures: the next chapter

‘Creative Futures: the next chapter’ gives one small UK business the opportunity to benefit from this expertise, working with the Creative Futures team to ideate, plan and run an omnichannel campaign, including print, from end-to-end, to uncover the benefits of this new way of working.

The goal for this live test-and-learn initiative is to create a best-in-class example to inspire the marketing and creative industries on what’s possible with a customer-centric approach to planning campaigns, working collaboratively with all partners to bring data, creativity, targeting capabilities and personalised print into the mix to be able to achieve measurable impact.

Creative Futures: the next chapter

This has been amazingly helpful to be surrounded with such expertise, learning so much so quickly about personalised print and being able to pull so much energy and resource to make the campaign successful.”

Creative Futures: the next chapter
Creative Futures: the next chapter

Learnings so far

While the journey is still ongoing – the campaign due to launch in June – the benefits of bringing all these different ideas, skills and disciplines to the table from the outset are already clear. Here are three lessons learned so far:

1. Audience exploration – data insights and expertise have enabled precise definition of the target audience of highest indexing households based on demographic profiles and regionality. Bringing brand-specific segmentation based on where herd mentality is influencing product sales makes acquisition data work harder. This process proves substantially higher order values.

2. Creative customisation – involvement from the get-go enabled creative designers to exploit thousands of variation possibilities at their fingertips, with a better understanding of how production technology enables unlimited personalisation and customisation. This means both imagery and messaging can adapt to defined profiles, exploiting all creative uses of clever personalisation, regionalisation, colour and design.

3. Seamless production – With production requirements and postage costs in mind upfront, working with the print service provider allows them to advise on the most compelling formats to fulfil the campaign brief, while demonstrating the best strategy for postal optimisation to drive cost efficiencies. Close co-operation of printer and creative teams from the beginning helps cut out many iteration feedback loops.

RE-IMAGINE OMNICHANNEL MARKETING COMMUNICATIONS WITH PERSONALISED PRINT

Hear from the next generation of creatives and learn the top tips for omnichannel marketing excellence with print.

Omnichannel marketing communications with personalised print
drupa 2024 - The power to move

On the drupa 2024 Canon stand, we explored Creative Futures and other initiatives that illustrated how market collaboration and end-to-end solutions enabled sustainable growth and prepared businesses for the future.

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