Designs of the Quarter: Online Ad, Coupon, Vector Art

The results of this year’s third Designs of the Quarter contest are in, and as always, I’m proud to present some of the best work within Affinity Express.

Online Ad

This eye-catching ad was an easy choice for Design of the Quarter because it grabs attention. Regardless of the online newspaper’s headline, you can’t ignore the ad because it surrounds the content. Even better, it earned high praise from our client: “We need to keep maintaining the high quality we’ve become accustomed to through Affinity Express. This is an AWESOME piece of creative built by your team. Keep up this great work.”

Retail Client Achieves 65% Lower Costs and Half the Turn Time

A design our team created for this client

We support several retail clients and their print design needs: in-store signage, flyers and image editing for product images on their websites are some typical products we work on. One of our clients is a leading grocery and pharmacy retailer with 2,500 stores, 140,000 employees and several well-known brands. In addition, the client also provides supply chain and business services to another 2,200 independent retailers. 

Cost Pressure and Inefficiency

In an innovative move designed to reduce costs, our client centralized production for the retail chains so all requests would come through corporate headquarters for better control and standardization. Yet they still needed a better way to provide support, reduce turn times and improve communication with external customers and internal design functions.

The company was outsourcing to a U.S.-based company, but the service was expensive and not meeting all their needs in the creative services segment. The company needed more productivity, lower costs and greater value for their investment.

As a result, the retailer made another breakthrough and decided to become one of the early adopters in the retail industry of business process outsourcing for advertising and media. The company selected Affinity Express, based on our reputation for transforming production for our clients, to build and operate an optimized onsite, onshore and offshore delivery platform, customized to meet the requirements of the client.

Working with Newspapers: A Success Story

Back in 2007, when the publisher of a daily newspaper owned by a large publishing company considered outsourcing ad production, the idea was greeted with surprise.

At the time, much of the newspaper industry was talking about and testing outsourcing. The publisher sent an employee to another newspaper’s office to learn about their outsourcing project–and that other newspaper was (and still is) an Affinity Express client.

The employee recognized the benefits of outsourcing and recommended moving forward with Affinity Express. So the newspaper became the first property from that publishing company to move forward with outsourced ad production.

Outsourcing gave the client an opportunity to eliminate unproductive staff.  They were amazed at how much more efficient they became. The client went live with outsourced production in late November 2008 and, after several weeks of long hours working on the transition, Affinity Express was performing well by the first week of 2009.

Learning from Each New Client and Process

It helps to look back at the distance you have traveled and think of what you would have done differently

The client in question is a provider of online advertising and marketing services for small to mid-sized businesses. We worked with the client to develop online and interactive ads for them.

This project was especially interesting for me because it was our first real opportunity to try out our new Virtual Account Manager workflow. We have been tweaking our delivery of online services, and set up the Virtual Account Manager workflow to provide clients more support during the ordering process. We tested it out internally, of course, and our first “client” was our internal marketing team: but this was the first external client and I was a bit anxious to see how it would work out.

What Customers Say: ASI Member on Working with Affinity Express

David Quas, President, Excell Print & Promotions Inc.

I want to share some glowing feedback we recently received from a customer.

David Quas, President, Excell Print & Promotions says:

You guys are amazing. Fast turnaround, artwork comes out perfect. I could not be happier with your service. I will make sure I spread the word about you guys. Keep up the good work!

Ad Production for Marketing Companies

Affinity Express works on marketing communications and advertisements, both print and online, so I am sometimes asked if we compete with marketing firms and ad agencies. The short answer: no, we don’t. They are clients or prospects for us, not competitors.

But how does this work? Let me explain.

A leading marketing services firm is a client. They have a thriving direct marketing business, reaching 100 million consumers each week and working with 15,000 advertisers. Their quality standards, it goes without saying, are impeccable.

And they have worked with Affinity Express since mid-2006, to get reliable ad production delivered at fast turnaround times and low costs.

Clients Rave about Our Embroidery Digitizing Results

Here is what Charles Brooks of Brass Ring Promotions told us recently:

The actual work Affinity does is very good. In fact I referred a new client to Affinity today…

The last logo was great. It made a great impression on the people who embroidered the logo.

Thanks for everything. I will refer everyone I know to Affinity.

This is the logo he was referring to.

What Clients Say About Us

Today, I want to share the results of the recent customer satisfaction survey we conducted for our graphic services customers.

We were overwhelmed by the number of responses we got:  by the many customers who took the time to tell us how much and why (or why not) they liked our services.

We got an overall score of 3.7 (5 being the best). We were rated 4 on quality of graphic work as well as price. 43% of respondents rated our quality of graphic work as 5!

My personal favorite is the response to the question “Over the next three months, how likely are you to use Affinity Express again?” We got rated 4.1 out of 5, and 59% respondents indicated they were “most likely” to use our services in the next three months.