Aug. 17, 2009— In our continuing series, Printing News talked to Jacob Aizikowitz, founder and president of XMPie Inc. We’re asking executives from all segments of the industry to answer the same set of questions, with the goal of providing you, our readers, with a good overall picture of the industry as a whole.

PN: Tell me a little about your company, the segment of the market it serves, and what you consider to be your “core” users.

JA: XMPie is the leading provider of software for cross-media, variable data one-to-one communications. XMPie solutions help businesses create and manage highly effective cross-media campaigns, leveraging their valuable information about markets and customers to achieve dramatic returns on their marketing investments. The company is headquartered in the United States (New York) with an R&D center in Israel, and sales, support and professional services operations across the globe.

XMPie users range from print and marketing services providers—our “core” users—to enterprises, small and large. The modular architecture of our software allows customers to tailor an entry configuration that matches their initial goals in personalization, and later grow the configuration—in functionality or bandwidth—to match their evolving and growing needs.

PN: How did you get involved with the company? What is your background before that?

JA: I started XMPie in July 2000 with my co-founders Israel Roth and Reuven Sherwin. We knew personalization was integral to customer acquisition and retention, but we saw it being implemented via two media types—print and the Internet—without any linkage between the two. We saw the potential to bridge that gap by creating technology and workflows that bring together these two media channels, and provide marketing with a media-agnostic approach to personalization.

Prior to XMPie, I was senior corporate director, Systems Technologies at Scitex, where I headed R&D projects that resulted in highly innovative digital printing products. Prior to joining Scitex, I was with IBM Haifa Research Lab, leading its Application, Solutions and Services Group. I was also part of the founding team of Electronics for Imaging (EFI) where I served initially as director of R&D and later as vice president of Engineering. My academic background consists of an undergraduate degree from Technion—Israel’s Institute of Technology—and a Ph.D. from Cornell University.

PN: What do you consider your greatest achievement to be?

JA: XMPie’s greatest achievement is the success of our users. I could run down a list of our technology patents or accolades, but in the end, we are in this business to empower our customers. At the most recent XMPie Users Group Conference I was incredibly impressed by the pioneering nature of our users and proud of their advancements in creating state-of-the-art personalized cross-media communications using our software. Their success is our success, and their ongoing pursuit of excellence keeps everyone at XMPie focused on providing the vision and tools to take our users to the next level.

An equally significant achievement for XMPie is our pioneering of the cross-media direction in our industry. When we started, the focus of the industry was all about print. We took an approach that emphasized highly creative variable data printing combined with integrated e-mail and Web. Today, most of the industry is on the path we charted early on, but we are still at the forefront with a solution architecture that brings together these vastly different media disciplines under one roof with one framework. In essence, our tag line “One-to-One-in-One” still truly describes our leadership and uniqueness.

PN: If there was anything you could change, either about your career in regards to the print industry, your company, or the market as a whole, what would it be and why?

JA: I am not one to look back on a situation and want to change it. I prefer to learn as much as I can from the obstacles I’ve faced. An important lesson I think we can learn from right now is the importance of being able to absorb a market situation and state-of-the-art technology to create something customers never knew to ask for, but would immediately want. Another lesson is that new things, like changes in concepts, take much more time for the market to absorb than what one is led to believe when listening to the first few early adopters. However, gaining the early enthusiasts and nurturing them is a critical element in building the bridge to the mainstream market.

PN: What is the greatest challenge to be for the industry right now? Why?

JA: In the past, the challenges faced by the industry were all around technology barriers. People did not know that solutions like those we created with XMPie were possible. In a way, our success and brand recognition in the market validated the criticality of the barriers we were helping remove.

Today, with a significant amount of the barrier removal behind us, the biggest challenge is whether the people who mastered the products and technology can also envision its use in marketing, customer-relationship management or business in general. Moreover, a related challenge is whether enterprises will accept the printers—who really embraced the technology—as their marketing advisors.

A popular piece of advice vendors and analysts are giving print providers is to become marketing professionals or marketing service providers. While this is desired and can be highly successful for those that will “Cross the Rubicon”, we must understand that not every printer can become a marketer. Another bit of advice, which isn’t often voiced, but is certainly practiced by smart printers, is that printers and agencies must collaborate. Merging technology savvy with marketing innovation can be an unbeatable combination that will secure enterprise business. Our software was designed to enable such collaboration, and we believe that this is a direction that must be emphasized and promoted more.

PN: What is the greatest asset to be for the industry right now? Why?

JA: Marketers need to reach their recipients in meaningful ways, now more than ever. In fact, a recent Epsilon survey of CMOs found that 94 percent of respondents agreed that a tough economic period is precisely the time when marketing plays a key role. The same survey also found that in these troubled times more CMOs are shifting to digital/interactive marketing, as well as more targeted and measureable marketing strategies. These survey findings confirm that service providers that offer cross-media communications and campaign response tracking and analytics in addition to print, are uniquely positioned to weather this economic storm.

PN: In your opinion, what have been the biggest changes to the way we communicate with one another in the past few years? How would you recommend this industry take advantage of that?

JA: Digital media—Web, e-mail and mobile—with its immediate, online, integrated and interactive nature is probably the biggest change. The richness of media choices that we have as individuals, and the fact that we use many of them together, and make choices in an immediate, live (online), “digital” fashion is a major defining factor of our communication style. We expect short, relevant, timely, quick and personal information.

Digital printing was not a member of this “digital spectrum”, mainly because despite its digital technology, the workflows serving it were archaic, print-buyer focused, and not in line with the communication revolution. A key effort that we took upon ourselves at XMPie was to bring digital printing and new media much closer together and use common workflows to serve them all. As we go forward, it’s important for service providers and enterprises to understand that they are actually managing continuous dialogues with their audience, where the conversations transcend media boundaries. So, the role of cross media as a technology is to enable this notion of cross-media dialogues. Only those that embrace this notion will succeed in achieving their marketing goals or winning enterprise business.

PN: Looking ahead, what major innovations or technologies do you believe will shape the future of the industry? Why?

JA: The near future will be about integration—both media integration and the fusion of marketing and publishing—all enabled by a single, practical one-to-one cross-media solution. Also, the distinctions in printing between high-speed and high-volume, versus full color and highly creative will fade away. Print technology will allow for full color, ultra high-speed and affordable digital printing and the software behind the scenes will allow for the design and production of highly creative documents without compromising print engine speed. Part of the software and hardware technology will be RIPs that allow high-speed rendering of highly creative variable data documents. In addition, advances in computing technology, mass scalability and cloud computing will make all of this very practical.

As we go forward, we will see much more personalization in the form of individuals customizing and personalizing a document—from a given, pre-prepared collection—with the goal of getting one copy, for them, immediately, on demand.

In a way, personalized printing will not be done only on high-end digital print presses, serving push marketing; it will also be done, pull-style, individually, by interaction with smaller, yet high-quality, office or departmental printers. The harmony between these two workflows will be an emerging theme.

As we look into the future, it is clear that digital books and digital documents—available today on devices such as the Amazon Kindle—will have an impact as one more digital element in the consumer’s media mix.

PN: What is the biggest piece of advice you would give to printers and others involved in this industry?

JA: Now is a critically important time for printers to explore cross-media, expanding their businesses to include revenue generating marketing services. One key reason is the need to manage response.

Managing response in the context of a direct mail campaign is a fundamental discipline, and all printers that go into serving the direct mail industry know and practice that. However, these days it isn’t about sending back a postcard or calling an 800 number—it is about Web-based response, personalized landing sites with all the richness of presentation and interaction that the Web can provide, and this means cross-media.

Printers need to understand that the days of a one-time blast of outbound direct mail pieces are over. It is now the era of multi-phase dialogues that can start in a booklet or postcard and continue through a response Web site. Taking a more general and high-level view of the need for cross-media, printers should realize that today’s advertisers need to touch their audience with a variety of media types, mostly because of the amazing progress in media, communications and rich content. A printer needs to be able to provide media-centric services rather than print-centric services.

It’s also important to take advantage of educational resources to become well versed in the latest directions and technologies. For example, we recently released a white paper, “Revolutionizing Marketing: The New Power of Cross-Media Communications,” that provides tremendous insight into how advances in cross-media communications technologies deliver huge advantages for savvy marketers and service providers. It is available from the download center on the XMPie Web site at www.xmpie.com. In addition, we have a forthcoming whitepaper discussing “Object-based Variable Data Print Languages” that will be released around Print 09, which will be very beneficial, as well.

PN: Is there anything else you would like to share with PN readers?

JA: I would say that there are two major themes we believe in at XMPie. The first is that creative is key. It is not enough to have relevant information and content in a communication. Presentation, attention-grabbing design and clarity, which are clearly understood to be critical in traditional marketing or publishing, are also critical in personalized communication. Second is the integration of media, through cross-media capabilities, and disciplines, such as marketing and publishing, are key for personalized, highly targeted marketing.

Our customers have tools that allow them to chart new paths in this fast evolving communication space, and be leaders of this industry as it shifts from traditional outbound-focused direct mail, to massively automated individualized, continuous dialogues.