Campaign competition – good for charity, good for digital print

Some of Australia’s leading digital printing and direct marketing industry players converged on a Sydney pub this week to help raise funding for a children’s medical charity and increase the presence of digital printing technology among the nation’s direct marketing agencies.

Sydney’s Grace Hotel played host to the Agency vs. Agency Pitch competition, which was held on the evening of 7 December and was designed as the starting point of an ongoing program to create and execute a multi-channel marketing and fund-raising campaign for the Smile Foundation children’s medical charity.

Over 80 DM and printing industry professionals braved the wet and blustery conditions on the day and turned up to play their part in supporting the competition, which was jointly sponsored by HP Indigo user's group Dscoop, ADMA, the Currie Group, and Satellite Digital Printing.

The competition saw marketing agency, Hallway, battle it out with the combined forces of fundraising group, 2 Evolve, and direct marketing experts, DM101. Despite the strengths of both campaign pitches, no winner was announced on the night. The decision will be left to the Smile Foundation as to which campaign will make the best use of the DM and printing services donated by the sponsors.

Satellite Digital donated $10,000 worth of digital print services for the winning campaign to the charity, and email marketing company, Lyris, matched it by offering up another $10,000 worth of marketing services. Additionally, printing and marketing support company, Chameleon Workflows, donated $5000 worth of their services to the campaign.

One of the instigators of the event, Currie Group’s Gary Warby, said the event was not only designed to help out a charity, but also to increase the awareness of direct mail success and digital printing technology among multi-channel marketers.

“The key aim is to get direct mail back into the minds if the industry,” said Warby. “Direct mail really does cut through compared to some of the new solutions.”

Dscoop was also involved with the event to help champion the importance of digital print and direct mail in the marketing industry, and worked alongside Currie Group to initiate and sponsor the competition.

David Minnett (pictured), managing director of Group Momentum and chairman of the Dscoop Asia-Pacific Steering Committee, said the event provided the perfect forum for the digital printers’ cooperative to reach out directly to industry clients on behalf of its members.

“Our aim was to really try to get the Dscoop message out,” said Minnett. “A lot of these people didn’t have any great awareness of what Dscoop is all about. Most of the [printing suppliers] that were there were up to speed, but for the agencies, they didn’t all know what Dscoop was about.”

To Minnett’s eyes, the event was a two-fold success, enabling a charity to launch a big marketing campaign, and introducing the marketing industry to some of the digital print possibilities in the direct mail channel.

“We’ve got a more complex media choice across electronic and digital and it is a matter of hitting all the right buttons, but electronic in isolation is not going to achieve the same degree of success,” said Minnett, highlighting the importance of printed material in any multi-channel marketing campaign.

The winning campaign is planned to begin rolling out around March next year.