Adobe Success Story

Eye on the future
Established print service provider supports customer success with Adobe Creative Suite 4 Design Premium software

Copies&Ink is an established print service provider that offers printing, direct mail, and business marketing services to customers nationwide. With many Fortune 1000 customers, the company serves a niche market of mid-market customers, including entrepreneurs, manufacturers, and professional services organizations. Copies&Ink works with business customers directly, as well as through advertising agencies, providing full-service print and online marketing services. Thorough knowledge of the latest technology, including Adobe Creative Suite 4 Design Premium software, helps the company provide customers with valuable training and exceptional service.

Benefits

• Help clients create cross-media campaigns that incorporate online and offline touch-points
• Provide customers with information to help them design environmentally aware, print-ready jobs
• Enable customers to print as needed, reducing inventories and waste

Project Details

The business of printing
Customers of Copies&Ink include Anchor Blue, UPS, ADP, Citizens Business Bank, and a number of government organizations, including the City of Rancho Cucamonga and Los Angeles County Vector Control. “Our customers are looking for a more sophisticated approach to their printing needs,” says Bill Alpert, president of Copies&Ink. “They want a partner that offers superior support, responsiveness, and reliability, for projects large and small in scope.”

Copies&Ink prides itself on offering superior customer service. With a wealth of business development knowledge, the company often advises customers in the implementation of their marketing projects. For customers not already working with an advertising agency, Copies&Ink draws upon a wide range of technical, logistical, and production resources, all under one roof. For its advertising agency clients, Copies&Ink shares best practices to help steer them in a successful direction.

Aubrey & Associates, Inc., an advertising agency customer of Copies&Ink, uses Variable Data Printing (VDP) to more accurately target campaigns for clients. VDP also enables the agency to maintain control of the final creative product.

“With current events restricting marketing budgets, we can deliver more bang for the buck using accurate data mining to target our clients’ most likely respondents with personal, relevant messages,” says Erin Johnson, production manager for Aubrey & Associates. “With VDP projects produced using Adobe Creative 4 Design Premium software we’ve been able to reduce production and mailing costs, nearly eliminate formatting and data issues during the printing process, and boost average response rates by 100% and more.”

Aubrey & Associates also appreciates the consistency and reliability that Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) files lend to VDP. “Although there’s an ever-increasing number of software products and printers on the market capable of VDP, we have found VDP projects produced using Adobe PDF are the most efficient and reliable,” adds Johnson.

Online evolution
The ability to produce high quality digital variable print projects is key to helping Copies&Ink better serve its customers. Using traditional printing presses, Copies&Ink can create a document shell and then personalize the variable elements using its digital print capabilities. Additionally, Copies&Ink produces traditional print and direct mail campaigns with online components to increase visibility and response rates.

For its own customer communications, Copies&Ink publishes InkBlot, a free how-to newsletter about printing, graphics, direct mail, and business marketing strategy. Copies&Ink creates both electronic and print versions of its newsletter, which are regularly distributed to a growing list of readers. Adobe InDesign CS4 is used to create the print component, while Adobe Dreamweaver CS4 is employed for the e-mail version of the newsletter. Graphics are easily shared between the two programs to ensure a consistent design aesthetic. The speed and ability to easily organize, browse, or locate creative assets in Adobe Bridge CS4 supports this process.

“We’re confident that as our customers increasingly look to integrate offline and online communications, the industry standard print and web development tools from Adobe will help us create cohesive campaigns that deliver results,” says Alpert.

Customer education
Copies&Ink is very committed to helping educate its customers. “Many customers are not formally trained in graphic design, so helping them successfully execute designs is an important part of our mission,” states Alpert. “By offering Adobe Creative Suite 4 Design Premium training through the Adobe Partner Connection program we help customers achieve the end results they desire.”

Workshops offered in partnership with Adobe enable Copies&Ink to share the latest product information with customers so they can take advantage of the new features with confidence. “Our customers are very interested in learning about the latest solutions from Adobe that will help them create print-ready files,” says Alpert. “Adobe Creative Suite 4 Design Premium offers some great new features that will help our customers design files knowing that they will print exactly as intended.”

Saving time in preflight
All job preflighting is done in-house at Copies&Ink and the majority of files received from customers are Adobe PDF files, with less than 50% of jobs received as native files. If a customer is not completely fluent with creating print-ready PDF files, Copies&Ink asks for the Adobe PDF file and native Adobe InDesign file.

“Adobe Creative Suite 4 Design Premium software offers many benefits and will help customers reduce time and costs associated with print jobs,” says Alpert. “The Live Preflight capability in Adobe InDesign CS4 lets designers see problems as they develop, which can save time tracking down problems further down the line.”

Features in Adobe Photoshop CS4 Extended also deliver noticeable improvements in the preflight process. “The Rotate View tool in Adobe Photoshop CS4 Extended lets preflight operators change the orientation of the canvas with no pixel distortion, so they no longer have to turn sideways to see upside down elements,” says Alpert. “The content-aware scaling in Adobe Photoshop CS4 Extended is also quite valuable because it lets designers upscale or downscale images to improve a composition, fit a layout, or change the orientation.”

Practicing sustainability
Sustainability is an important concern for Copies&Ink, and over the years the company has taken many steps to minimize its impact on the environment. These steps fall into two general categories: reducing waste and environmental impact though production and materials processes and “Organic Print.”

“Organic Print” encourages users of print to consider the reason for the materials they produce as well as their design, and the strategy behind their distribution. Each of these factors has an important potential impact on the carbon footprint of the printed piece. “The industrial age economy has given way to a new paradigm based on information and innovation and printing firms need to keep pace and let go of the idea that more is better,” says Alpert. “There is a declining ROI in old-style mass marketing, and new solutions, such as variable data printing, are more effective and also better for the planet.”

In practical terms, this approach often means Copies&Ink will ask a client to reconsider a project’s design and sometimes even whether it should be printed at all. In the long term, this forges a stronger, more lasting relationship with the client.

Copies&Ink is well on its way to reducing its environmental impact, and sees a bright future that includes less printing and more personalization and complimentary online deliverables. “Today’s technology, together with products like Adobe Creative Suite 4 Design Premium, offers our clients the ability to target and personalize on a one-to-one basis,” says Alpert. “This is the future of print, and it has already arrived.”

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