Challenge

In order to better service their client, Wisconsin-based marketing services agency Bader Rutter & Associates needed to design and deploy an enhanced variable data publishing system.

Dow AgroSciences (DAS), a 25-year client of the agency and a $3.8 billion subsidiary of Dow Chemical, provides innovative technologies for crop protection, pest and vegetation management, seeds, traits, and agricultural biotechnology.

DAS approached Bader Rutter about identifying a more efficient way for its Mycogen Seeds brand to produce, customize and distribute marketing collateral for its salespeople in the field.

It would not be an easy task. Mycogen markets over 300 products, with each product described by over fifty data points. John R. Gilbert, Vice-President of Bader Rutter's Digital Solutions Group, says: "Using traditional desktop publishing software, we used to painstakingly create one-page tech sheets for each of the products, using data from the field, and compile them into a 300-page product positioning manual. It took a long time and made updates to the content expensive."

A major challenge with the old system was that product information would become outdated very quickly. While new data was continuously being collected by agronomists in the field evaluating seed hybrids, marketing materials could not keep up with the pace of change. "Putting together the product positioning manual for dealers and salespeople was so cumbersome that it could only be managed once a year," says Gilbert. "Our client wanted to get new data in the system when it was available."

Mycogen also wanted to offer users more flexibility and customizability. For example, many would be interested in only a single product category, like soybeans, but had to order the entire manual in the past. Mycogen wanted to give them the ability to "pick and pack" - that is, select information on just the products they needed and to tailor marketing materials accordingly.

Solution

After exploring a number of industry offerings, Bader Rutter was most intrigued by Bitstream's Pageflex™. The agency realized, however, that their growing digital solutions group was not yet staffed to handle all of the required software engineering themselves and originally intended to let Dow AgroSciences deal directly with a third party solution provider.

"We then decided to make it a part of our own integrated marketing services offerings," Gilbert says. But first, Bader Rutter needed to find a Pageflex Integrator that was up to the task. NAPC got the call. "We got the right partner to do it," says Gilbert. "On our very first deployment, we were actually asking Pageflex to do a lot of heavy lifting. This was not a simple implementation and we were hoping that an investment in Pageflex would help us accomplish our goals."

It proved to be a risk well worth taking, thanks in large part to the support, training and extensive custom development work that NAPC provided. Gilbert says, "The Pageflex platform is powerful but, like any technology, it can be twitchy. The NAPC guys were great. They really stuck by us and have been teaching us how to fish."

NAPC created the entire administrative workflow for the project, from the web interface that allows agronomists to enter product data to custom script work that dynamically creates charts for end users based on those data points. The resulting solution greatly streamlined the creation of the product manual for the client, turning it into a mostly automated, self-serve system.

Donna Queisser, account executive at Bader Rutter, describes how the solution came together: "We wanted to get all the information in a central database. Once the database was built, our client could connect to the Pageflex interface to update data for the tech sheets as often as they wanted. That information would then be published automatically to Pageflex Storefront, where end users could build their own customized book from the pages in the product positioning manual. Based on their requests, pages would be pulled together through Print on Demand. When an order for a document is placed online, the system can generate output directly to a print partner to have it shipped right to the recipient's door. Each order can be tailored exactly to the customer's specifications."

Result

"It's been a huge improvement to have all the data that goes into the templates in one location," Queisser says. "Where we previously had to do it by hand, now it's done in an automated fashion and next year will be even easier now that the system is built."

Gilbert adds, "Bader Rutter is offering consistency and customization in a timely fashion. A team of people here used to take weeks to do this. Now dealers can say, 'I want these 17 sheets' and get a PDF in seconds." The agency has also cut down on waste, now that dealers can order just what they need, when they need it.

Best of all, Pageflex is generating new business and revenue for the agency. Now that the solution is in production, Gilbert reports that the client has uncovered additional needs and is already planning to apply the Pageflex solution to other parts of the business. In fact, Bader Rutter recently received approval to implement its fourth Pageflex project for Dow AgroSciences and the first for another global client.

"In 6 months, we went from knowing very little about Pageflex to making it a core component of our digital service offering," says Gilbert. "Our goal is to become less reliant on outside help and pull off implementations on our own. NAPC knows that and they've been helping us work toward that."

Because NAPC architected the program so the service could be made available to other businesses, Bader Rutter now has a new service offering that it can use to attract more client business. And interest so far has been extremely high. "We've shown our work to other clients," says Gilbert. "And everyone has come back asking, 'Can you do that for us?' It's not everyday a 37-year-old agency can add an entirely new discipline in less than a year. We have invested in technology and people and have also plugged into partners for the print-on-demand component. It is exciting technology and fits perfectly with what our clients look to receive from our integrated marketing agency offerings."