Promising transpromo future for the DM sector

As we know, it’s all being happening to address the growing trend for personalised direct mail and ‘transpromo’ documents, which mix transactional mailing with targeted messages, and the decline of the old-style carpet-bombing approach to DM.

But is it all worth it? As we report this week, a survey by DsiCMM claims that more than £500m of potential advertising space on ‘transpromo’ documents is going unused every year. Advertisers, it seems, just aren’t switching on to the possibilities that their print providers are offering.

Better take-up of transpromo marketing by media agencies and other advertisers would be a boon for those digital printers currently offering it. Its widespread adoption by marketers would also reflect well on print as a whole, as it is one of the few areas where print technology can directly give advertisers innovation that both complements and competes with online direct marketing.

All of which makes it all the more sad that Royal Mail has chosen not to support Print Sells, the pan-European campaign to promote print as a medium to the marketing and adver­tising industry. In our increasingly online-dominated world, campaigns such as Print Sells need all the help they can get, and the bigger the supporting organisation, the better.

Although it is facing bigger problems elsewhere in its organisation, and surely has its reasons for not supporting Print Sells, Royal Mail is still keen to promote print elsewhere (see page 4). For the industry’s sake, and its own, let’s hope it does.

Josh Brooks is deputy editor of PrintWeek.