Issue 1- September 2008
What is Dynamic Publishing?
By Joshua Duhl
Welcome to the inaugural edition of The Dynamic Publisher, a bi-monthly newsletter that provides you with insightful articles and information about dynamic publishing.
Dynamic publishing is new to many of our readers. In this issue we take an introductory look at what dynamic publishing is and provide an overview of how it can help you customise and personalise communications to your clients, ensure brand consistency and improve the customer experience while lowering cost.
We define dynamic publishing as: The automated assembly of customised documents with graphic-rich layouts for multiple mediums, including print, the Web, mobile and electronic devices. Dynamic publishing allows organisations to deliver accurate, relevant, and high-fidelity communications across multiple types of media faster and at a lower cost.
Automation: Saving Time, Reducing Costs
Automation is key to dynamic publishing. Today, many documents, especially those with inspiring layouts, are hand crafted — typically by graphic designers. Customising these documents for different audiences or purposes is a time-consuming, manual process. Automation enables you to leverage the skill of these designers and scale the publishing process to provide more personalised communications. It allows you to generate promotional pieces, advertisements, articles, publications, Web pages, and other documents with consistent branding and appearance, and at the same time lets you assemble each with minor variations so that each piece is customised for a particular individual or audience. Automation eliminates errors typically introduced by “cut and paste” or other manual steps common to many publishing workflows. And it also provides some of the dynamism: by automating the process and eliminating the manual steps, it's vastly faster and less expensive to produce nearly limitless variations of a single source of content.
Although automation is required for dynamic publishing, this does not mean that the entire process needs to be automated. A good example of this is a publisher who uses a dynamic publishing solution to automate the generation of a story into both Web and print versions, which can then enter the organisation’s existing Web and print workflows for review and editing. The automation jump-starts the process, speeding the delivery of Web content, where time is critical, while allowing the print version to proceed at its scheduled pace. In any publishing workflow, certain tasks, such as review and approval, will always be manual. So a dynamic publishing solution must always be able to include manual workflow steps, including content selection, editing, review, and approval.
Typical Automation Scenarios
A given organisation may have multiple dynamic publishing needs. You may need to generate different kinds of materials for different purposes. These could include:
- Localised advertisements, promotions, and business stationery
- Personalised marketing pieces and promotions
- Catalogs and directories
- Magazines and newspapers
- Product materials that include marketing brochures, white papers, and technical documentation
Ads, Promotions, and Stationery
Creating localised advertisements, promotions, and business stationery using a Web-to-print application is a good example of a form of dynamic publishing based entirely on request. Local retailers might use a Web-based application to customise an advertisement, promotion, stationery or business cards from a set of corporate-approved designs.
After selecting a layout, retailers could enter appropriate information such as their business addresses, hours of operation, slogans, or details of a particular promotion. They might also select from a set of approved images, or if allowed, upload and use their own images, and drag and drop them into allowed places in the layout. The application could automatically format the text they provide, and in some cases, copyfit it to the space provided, perhaps by automatically reducing its font size. It could produce either PDFs ready for printing or Web pages for inclusion in a Web site or creation of microsite.
This solution allows retailers to customise the output being produced while staying within the approved corporate branding and style. At any point in the workflow they can get a ready-to-print version for review and then send it to an ad agency or to a printer for production.
Personalised Marketing Pieces and Promotions
A personalised or “one-to-one” marketing campaign, where each offer, invitation, or promotion is custom-tailored to each individual recipient, is another common example of employing the automation of dynamic publishing.
Variable data printing (VDP) and database publishing applications allow for high-volume, automated generation of these promotional pieces. In these applications, the publishing system automatically fills designated areas of a layout (representing a postcard, HTML e-mail, or custom landing page) with specific information or images pulled from a database, based on each individual’s preferences. The result is a consistent set of personalised content that is ready to print, send in an e-mail, or publish on a Web site.
Catalogues and Directories
A catalogue is a multi-page document in which each page typically uses one of several layouts. The pages need to incorporate a variety of content components, such as pictures of various items, as well as their product description, SKU, size information, pricing, and other details. The catalogue may require information from multiple data sources and systems. A catalogue is therefore a much more complex dynamically published document than a localised ad or a personalised promotion. As a result, catalogue publishing applications tend to be much more complex and powerful.
Similarly, directories are another example of a multi-page document that is made up of multiple layouts or templates and requires content components that can be pulled from one or several data sources. They tend to be less complex than catalogues.
Multi-channel Documents
The ability to automate or partially automate the production of marketing brochures, newsletters, white papers, technical documentation, and magazines or newspapers in multiple formats (Web, print, mobile devices, e-mail) is of increasing interest to many companies. They want the efficiency and overall brand or story consistency, but require different variations in the content or style depending on certain criteria, such as the desired output media, a different layout, or potentially the target audience.
Unfortunately, most companies achieve this by hand-crafting each document for the particular medium. An approach using XML-based structured documents, however, is well suited for both multi-channel output and for automation. This is because XML allows authors to create content components without concern for their formatting and provides the absolute consistency that automation requires.
With this “content-centric” publishing approach, content is created first, independent of format, and the system applies the formatting later depending on specific criteria. Your authors can easily access and combine content components in a variety of different ways depending on the needs of your business. Multinational companies can see great benefits because they can publish the same content in multiple languages at lower cost and with much greater efficiency. A properly planned and implemented content-centric implementation yields significant content reuse, which leads to substantial cost savings, productivity enhancements, and time-to-market benefits.
As you can see, dynamic publishing automates the generation of a variety of document types. Because of this, dynamic publishing can take form in a number of applications, each addressing a different use case to produce a different specific output. In summary these applications include:
- Web-to-print for custom advertisements, promotions, or business stationery
- Variable data publishing for one-to-one marketing
- Data-driven production of catalogs and directories
- Content-centric publishing for structured documents, including marketing collateral, technical publications, newsletters, magazines, and newspapers
You can find out more about the industry leading Quark® Dynamic Publishing Solution, including answers to frequently asked questions about dynamic publishing, by visiting http://dynamicpublishing.quark.com/en/dps/faq.html.
