Marketing with CDs & DVDs
Cost-Effective Business Communication by Disc
Innovative businesses are still successfully getting
their message out and telling their stories on optical
disc, delivering all types of content in a form that is
increasingly easy to create, highly portable, cheap to
distribute, user-friendly, and simple to recycle.
Discs make an excellent communication medium,
and you’re only limited by your imagination when
developing the content. Discs offer a simple, universal means to convey
information in digital form to anyone, anywhere. You
have to do some serious hunting to find a household
that doesn’t have a DVD player, and, the DVD drives
included with most computers will play everything from
the latest movie releases to the earliest audio CDs.
Unlike the early days of optical disc technology, today
you can send just about any kind of a disc to anyone
with a high degree of confidence that he or she will be
able to play it without difficulty.
Case Studies
VIDEO STORYTELLING MOVES FROM THE INTERNET TO DVD
When Christopher Cannucciari began capturing his
grandmother’s stories and recipes from the Great Depression
on video and then posting them on YouTube,
he wasn’t fully prepared for the surge of interest in the
topic. As he quickly discovered, not everyone has a fast
enough internet connection to display video effectively,
and some people prefer to sit down in front of their TV
and watch shows in comfort.
Clara Cannucciari, now 93 years old, became an internet
star, with over 1.5 million YouTube viewings, by relating
experiences from her Sicilian-American neighborhood
in Chicago and sharing the recipes that helped
her family stretch their food dollars during economic
hardships. After multiple requests from her fan base,
Christopher decided to put episodes from the popular
cooking show on DVD to expand his audience reach.
As a professional cinematographer and director,
Christopher knew exactly how he wanted the production
and the packaging to look and turned to the pros
at Disc Makers to help him realize his vision for the
project. Working with his wife (professional photographer
Abby Cope) and video editor Alison Shurman,
Christopher videotaped several additional episodes of
the show and began assembling the digital content for
the DVD
A HUGE BOOST IN RESPONSE RATES
Essex Technology Group (EssexTec) provides server
virtualization solutions and deploys highly costeffective
systems that maximize server resource use.
It’s a complex and specialized field, and the first step
in harvesting prospects comes in the form of a
CD-ROM that invites the recipient to a seminar where
the virtues of this technology are explained.
Packed with links, videos, and PDFs that explain
virtualization, EssexTec’s CD-ROMs have proven
a very effective tool for drawing prospective
customers. Response rates from the CD-ROM mailings
typically draw more than four times the response rates
of printed mailings the company previously used –
they’ve increased their response by 400% with these
CD-ROMs.
“We use the CD-ROM to hot link directly to our
website,” says Lee Sowers, Vice President of Marketing
for the Essex Technology Group. “We link right to
the landing page for the event. The page describes the
event in more detail, gives an agenda, discusses what
we’ll be talking about, and provides an opportunity to
register online.”
As a $100 million company competing with $2 billion
value-added resellers, EssexTec leverages the business
communication capabilities of their CD-ROM to give
seminar participants the background they need to get
more out the presentations. Links to partner sites –
IBM and VMWare – detail the technical specifications of
the solutions offered and ensure that the most current
information is immediately accessible.
EssexTec has earned the highest partnership level with
IBM (Premier Business Partner) and VMWare (VMWare
Enterprise-Level Partner) – a stature that can often be
a deal maker with new clients. The introductory CDROM
helps open doors as well. “We’ve engineered
this CD-ROM for our marketing,” explains Sowers. “
It allows us to compete on the same level as the
billion-dollar guys with the same level of technical
competence and credibility in the industry. It’s a very
powerful tool. We used to use traditional printed materials to get
across the same information and we would typically
have 10 people show up at a lunch. When we use the
CD-ROMs, we usually have over 40 participants attend,
so our response has increased by over 400 percent
using the CDs.”
E-mail: info@burgosmedia.com