Innovation insight
West-based agency Proctor & Stevenson shares some PURLs of wisdom
The early years of the Millennium gave rise to many innovations in corporate communications; digital variable print technology and the realisation that CRM was a real benefit, being just two of them.
With a 27 year track record, Bristol-based design and communications company Proctor & Stevenson saw an opportunity to utilise digital print as one of the components of a truly integrated multi channel personal marketing system. This was the start of a quest to develop a marketing technology system that today is known as Intimis.
Realising that digital print was an ideal mechanism for personalised communication was only the beginning. Proctor & Stevenson had a vision for variable communications over multiple channels, delivering the right message to the right audience at the right time. Print, email and SMS broadcasting along with web technology and call centres could all play their part. The missing links were tying them all together and being able to quickly report on and measure campaign effectiveness. Thus began a worldwide search to find a CRM system that could realise this vision.
The stunning realisation was there were no such systems. Consultants were heavily pushing CRM systems as the way forward in customer relationship marketing, but universally these systems required a massive investment both in monetary terms and human resources. The reality was that CRM systems were failing to deliver against marketers ambitions.
Totally convinced that integrated, personalised, multi-channel communications, with solid reporting, feedback and the ability to dynamically adjust campaigns was the way forward, this Bristol based company decided to recruit an in-house development team to build its vision. Over the next five years they invested £2.5M of their own money to research, develop and refine a ground breaking system that implemented that vision. The system is now commercially available and being actively used by clients throughout Europe. Why would a creative agency jump into the highly technical world of hard-core IT engineering? Because they believed in their vision and had the creativity, courage and commitment to realise it. Proctor & Stevenson have filed patents for significant parts of the technology. Along the road they became HP Business Partners, enabling them to tap into the latest variable print technology.
Sitting at the core of the Intimis product is personal url’s or purls as they have become known. Intimis was architectured from the beginning to cope with huge volumes so it will come as no surprise to learn that they are talking to one of their clients about generating a purl for every person on the UK electoral register. It is this purl that drives the personalisation, irrespective of the communications channels that clients select. A highly personalised microsite is dynamically created for each purl, thus delivering the ultimate in personalised one-to-one marketing communications. Intimis is delivered as a web-based set of modules and clients are able to buy in to either the base level with purls (and of course pins for additional security) and reporting, all the way through to a full creative solution.
The investment doesn’t stop. Proctor & Stevenson now have a dedicated business, Intimis Ltd, established to market and licence the technology not only to end users but also to design and communication agencies, printers, and corporate information solution providers.
So five years down the line, what results are clients seeing? This is where it gets really exciting. Household names such as Picture Financial use Intimis to control all of the personalisation that flows from their high profile television campaign. Wyse Technology have seen their response rate increase by 400% and Inside Track have seen a massive increase in response rates allied with a 50% reduction in cost per lead. The list goes on, and is testament to the realisation of Roger Proctor’s vision. In the words of Stephen Yeo, Worldwide Marketing Director as IGEL, “they are the best of the best.”
The industry is beginning to take notice too. According to Print Media Magazine in March 2007, Proctor & Stevenson are “recognised as the country’s leading experts in one to one communications.”
The vision has become a reality and that reality is a true multi channel dialogue marketing system called Intimis. Invented and made in the South West of England!