Know-How Exchange : Advertising/PR

Gary- Thanks for the resources - one coves postage and the other the paper ingredient - very useful. I'm afraid that the third one came up with a 404 error. I can calculate the spend on brochure printing in tonnes of paper so that sort of gets me part way there. Any ideas about what the printing process adds? Also big thanks for reminding me of postage. One of his products can replace about six mailings, so that is a big factor.

Steve

PS Does Zig-Zag come up yet on Google where you are? It only went live a week ago and Curveball sometimes fails to list on the PPC bit! The trade name for his product is Z Cards but although it is generic, it is also subject to a trademark. However, we've got www.curveballprintmedia.com triggering for most variants of z card search as the enforcers of the trademark forgot that Google equates z Card with card Z!

Dear Steve,

Sorry about the dead link.

As for printing and carbon footprints, this article might help:
https://www.inkworldmagazine.com/articles/2010/01/ink-industry-faces-challe...

You might also want to look at soy-based inks. Here's another link that might help:

https://www.psprint.com/about/recycled/index.asp

Hope this helps.

Jay – The product is well researched and its effectiveness in different contexts is quite well defined. For a given application you have to factor is its longevity, the number of times it is consulted, the engagement it engenders by simply using it and the number of people who actually bother to open and read it.

Then there is the effectiveness of the promotional idea. A card for Electronic Measuring Instruments which combined a set of thermocouple tables would be used to death whereas one which just contained a catalogue of products would be less used.

I will get the researched figures, but the latter, in comparison to a leaflet on the same subject, is quite large, so your suggestion would have me use quite a large factor to compare the carbon footprint of one Zig-Zag card to the number of mailings needed to achieve the same impact? That is a bigger benefit than I had initially considered, both in terms of their cost effectiveness and their carbon saving potential.


What is weird about this media as a class of promotion is that I have discovered that the manufacturers have ignored whole market sectors – for example, the folding media industry as a whole has never marked itself to the instrumentation industry, despite the fact that they are big print users and the Zig-Zag card is an attractive proposition over conventional printing. It seems that they have concentrated on the glamorous and the volume consumer product markets and a few other niches like leisure. It is something we are addressing!

Phil – good point. You can tell that I’ve never actually had to calculate carbon footprints or their associated costs before, despite as a scientist, believing that they address part of a serious problem.

What I am attempting to do is to arrive at some averages which are simplifications but which will suffice for PR purposes. You will see above that I also need to include a series of factors for the effectiveness of the media versus a standard mailer – this works equally in favour of cost effectiveness and carbon-footprint reduction.

What I’m looking for then is the typical relationship between different types of print, say, leaflet, brochure and book-form and their respective range of carbon equivalents.

Through interviewing a few their marketing managers (With the bait of giving them these results for their own Carbon Reduction marketing!) I can gain a fairly good idea about the ratio of the different types. It’s not often that I ask for “industry average” figures but in this instance, the use of averages is valid!

Editors of vertical market trade magazines will be looking for a newsworthy story which is at least credible in its claims – not a set of exactly researched equivalence tables!

Hmmm! Soy inks! What you gain in carbon emission reduction, you probably lose in an auto-suggestive food consumption through a desire to eat take-away Chinese food. Do they do sweet and sour inks?!

Marcus - I'm ordering a table-bottle of soy ink even as I type!

Thanks for the ideas and the guidance guys - it has saved me from making a lot of mistakes. I need to refine may assessment because to weigh the Zig-Zag cards against t printed sheet mailer, a postcard and a four page glossy, I came up with a relative effectiveness score of between 56 and 72. As that is saying that Zig-Zag is 56-72 TIMES more effective (In carbon terms and almost the same in cost terms)

I needed to check my assumptions because these figures appeared to be too optimistic. Your contributions have unfortunately inflated them yet further, so I just might be onto a couple of new USP's for the client where are both carbon and cost effective in different ways for different uses of the card.

Thanks again

Steve