Adobe Drives the VDP Bandwagon with New VDP Resource Center

Coinciding with Creo’s debut at Graph Expo 2004 of the Darwin Variable Information plug-in suite for InDesign CS, Adobe announced today the launch of the Adobe Variable Data Publishing (VDP) Resource Center, an educational resource for creative professionals, marketing departments and print service providers that aims to kick-start the adoption and implementation of VDP solutions.

VDP auto­mates the cre­ation of cus­tomized mate­ri­als by merg­ing recur­ring con­tent from a page lay­out tem­plate with vari­able data import­ed from a dig­i­tal data­base. Using dynam­ic design soft­ware, such as Adobe InDesign CS, cre­ative pro­fes­sion­als and mar­keters then assem­ble these unique doc­u­ments in which text, col­or and imagery are as indi­vid­ual as each recip­i­ent. VDP can pro­vide an addi­tion­al rev­enue stream for print­ers, and let mar­keters deliv­er more per­son­al­ized cam­paigns that achieve high­er response rates, yield greater return on invest­ment and build stronger cus­tomer relationships.

One recent suc­cess­ful proof-of-concept use of VDP was Reason magazine’s con­tro­ver­sial June issue. As we report­ed in April, each of the month­ly Libertarian magazine’s 40,000 sub­scribers received a copy of Reason with a dif­fer­ent cov­er photo—a satel­lite pho­to of his own neigh­bor­hood with his house circled.

“Reason is the per­fect exam­ple of VDP,” said Michael Taylor, con­sul­tant and for­mer assis­tant cre­ative direc­tor for Imaginations UNlimited. “Adobe’s VDP Resource Center—indeed, VDP in general—is tar­get­ing mar­keters and direct mail­ers for now. But Reason proved that per­son­al­ized con­tent isn’t lim­it­ed to mar­riage mail and form let­ters. Just think about the pos­si­bil­i­ties!” Nick Gillespie, edi­tor in chief of Reason, is already think­ing of pos­si­bil­i­ties: “What if you received a mag­a­zine that only had sto­ries and ads that you were inter­est­ed in and per­tained to you? That would be a mag­a­zine that every­one would want to read.”

VDP as a con­cept isn’t new; word proces­sors and even PageMaker have had mail-merge func­tion­al­i­ty for more than a decade. Making the process tru­ly effi­cient with graph­i­cal­ly rich con­tent, how­ev­er, is a rel­a­tive­ly new con­cept to for-print publications.

Adobe Illustrator has had VDP func­tion­al­i­ty since ver­sion 10 was released in 2001, though few know the fea­ture is there, much less exploit it.

Here is one of those rare places where the Web came before print. Because of the dynam­ic nature of the Internet, cook­ies allowed web­sites to iden­ti­fy and cus­tomize con­tent for users via data­base inte­gra­tion, but it was only text and code; it couldn’t per­son­al­ize graph­i­cal con­tent that hadn’t been pre­built in a fixed form. Once Macromedia released Flash Generator serv­er, online vari­able data deliv­ery took a huge leap for­ward. Now a design­er could build rich, immer­sive designs with high­ly cre­ative dynam­ic graph­ics gen­er­at­ed on the fly in response to any per­son­al­iza­tion request passed to the server.

Before Flash Generator, Adobe’s now defunct ImageStyler han­dled lim­it­ed VDP. “ImageStyler,” recalls Taylor wist­ful­ly. “Man, that made the task of build­ing or rebrand­ing a 700 page web­site a breeze. We nev­er had to make head­line or sub­head graph­ics by hand. ImageStyler did it all.”

ImageStyler was a single-purpose appli­ca­tion: It crawled an entire web­site look­ing for instances of text enclosed in par­tic­u­lar HTML tags (<H1> or <class=something>), then, using a spe­cial­ly for­mat­ted Photoshop-created tem­plate, con­vert­ed each instance into a new graph­ic image. Regrettably ImageStyler was ahead of it’s time. Perhaps it was the sim­i­lar name it bore to the then also new ImageReady, which was ini­tial­ly sold as a stand­alone appli­ca­tion rather than bun­dled with Photoshop as it is now. Whatever the rea­son, ImageStyler was retired after only one ver­sion and a sin­gle .1 udpate. It won’t run on any Windows sys­tem high­er than Windows 98 or on Macs lat­er than OS 9.

Now that the mar­ket­ing, adver­tis­ing, and design indus­tries are final­ly begin­ning to under­stand the val­ue of VDP in the print world, Adobe is, typ­i­cal­ly, already sit­ting in the driver’s seat.

”Today, more media chan­nels and con­tent streams com­pete for con­sumer atten­tion. As a result, con­sumers expect mar­ket­ing mate­ri­als to be per­son­al­ized. Our stud­ies with con­sumers indi­cate that 69 per­cent pre­fer high­ly per­son­al­ized direct mail. Spam laws have com­pli­cat­ed this issue, forc­ing mar­keters to iden­ti­fy new ways to reach cus­tomers with per­son­al­ized con­tent,” said Charlie Corr, group direc­tor, InfoTrends/CAPVentures. “These chal­lenges have cre­at­ed new busi­ness oppor­tu­ni­ties for print providers in the form of VDP. Printers are able to offer more value-added ser­vices that increase rev­enue and mar­keters are devel­op­ing cam­paigns that get a high­er cus­tomer response rate.”

Adobe’s VDP Resource Center show­cas­es tech­nolo­gies and prod­ucts and deliv­ers edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to assist cre­ative pro­fes­sion­als and print providers in build­ing direct mar­ket­ing, lead gen­er­a­tion, and loy­al­ty cam­paigns quick­ly and eas­i­ly. Customers can down­load free tri­al soft­ware and pur­chase VDP plug-in solu­tions from Adobe ISV part­ners, com­pat­i­ble with the Adobe Creative Suite, direct­ly from the Resource Center.

A host of VDP design and pub­lish­ing tools from soft­ware devel­op­ers and dig­i­tal out­put sys­tem providers are avail­able as plug-ins for the Adobe Creative Suite. XMPie, Datalogics, Creo, Em Software and Sansui all offer VDP work­flow solu­tions to address a broad spec­trum of needs. For exam­ple, with the new uDirect plug-in for Adobe InDesign CS from XMPie, cre­ative pro­fes­sion­als can design, pre­view and out­put VDP files for a mul­ti­tude of out­put devices direct­ly from their desk­top. The DL Formatter DL-100 from Datalogics lets Adobe Acrobat users cre­ate tem­plates in any design tool and add the vari­able ele­ments and log­ic from with­in Acrobat.

”Marketers, design­ers and print providers that offer VDP-enabled solu­tions can grow their own busi­ness­es by help­ing cus­tomers pro­duce more effec­tive and prof­itable com­mu­ni­ca­tions cam­paigns,” said Jim Heeger, senior vice pres­i­dent of Creative Professional Products at Adobe. “With Adobe Creative Suite, InDesign CS and Acrobat on the desk­top, VDP work­flows are now acces­si­ble to a new gen­er­a­tion of cre­ative pro­fes­sion­als who want to deliv­er per­son­al­ized cam­paigns for print or the web.”

The VDP band­wag­on is rolling, and Adobe is dri­ving. Giddyup!