Tag Archives: posters

Lessons learned from distributed in-store advertising

1 August 2013 Nick Mulgrew

We discovered soon after we began to create outlet- and product-specific posters and send them out via our newsletter that they made a difference to sales. In fact, a survey done by Yazeed at one point showed that outlets that advertised with posters had more success than others. (This, in retrospect, is incredibly obvious, but we thought people might have been driven to stores or to buy products by being encouraged to do so by… well, I’m not sure, actually.)

When Marie arrived in April 2013, it freed me up to do more material design work. Marie set about calling outlets to find out more about them and to make sure they were on board with our system. We made sure that, when she called an outlet, she asked if they wanted any materials made for them for the upcoming matric exam season. As part of our offering, we would design posters and flyers. These materials included price lists on them for up to 50 of our matric products, which we could change for every outlet that wanted them. There was sound reasoning behind this, initially: we assumed that, if we did the heavy lifting for outlets and gave them something specific to them and ready-made for them, they would take to using materials with more enthusiasm, and would get some outlets that didn’t have design capabilities to be able to engage with and to advertise Paperight better.

This was a pretty disastrous idea, for a number of reasons:

The amount of requests for materials that we got was overwhelming, and we only had one designer: me, who had many other responsibilities to take care of.
Outlets sometimes weren’t even too sure of their own pricing structures, or would arbitrarily change things, and so would ask us to make multiple revisions to the same materials because they couldn’t be bothered to tell us what their prices were and, even if they did, tended not to stick to them.
Manually changing 50 or so prices for every flyer and poster, and copy-pasting logos and contact details, was mindnumbing and uncreative work. I felt like I missed a month of my life around July, as every day was the same task, in a sense.
Outlets didn’t buy into the materials as much as we hoped. Some never printed them, effectively making the work a waste of time.

These problems piled the misery on me, with the result that I entered into quite a deep slump for a few weeks. I began to resent my work and what I was doing and, even worse, the people I was supplying materials for. The work was repetitive and seemed to have little effect on sales and/or engagement with products with outlet owners. I realised that something drastic had to change.

Design, Marketing

Varsity advertising tinkering at Aloe X

1 March 2013 Nick Mulgrew

Having studied in Grahamstown, I wanted to make a Paperight outlet thrive there. The conditions were perfect: Grahamstown is a small, relatively low-income university town. Money is low, and demand for books is high. In 2012, I made contact with Aloe X, the closest copy shop to Rhodes University, after the university themselves showed no real interest in adopting a pilot Paperight project of their own.

I made contact with Aloe X the day after I travelled to Peddie for a research trip in May 2012. I handed them a business card, spoke to the manager Aletta, and reassured her that it was a free service.

Despite good intentions, we only really started getting involved with Aloe X at the end of 2012, in preparation for the beginning of the 2013 academic year. I figured out a strategy whereby we would collect the set lists of books from the English literature and Classics departments, figure out which ones we had on the system, and then make posters and flyer designs to stick up at Aloe X and around Rhodes campus.

At this point we found out that Aloe X had almost been closed down due to a spate of textbook piracy that ended in a visit from the police. Essentially, students would bring in books, the staff (without the owner’s or manager’s knowledge) would scan them and keep the files on their computer. Students could then get their textbooks printed immediately for R50–R100. Almost exactly the same as Paperight – but, you know, super illegal.

The copy on our advertising, until then, had been quite tame. Seldom did we have provocative taglines that foregrounded the bad aspects of traditional bookselling, lest we upset potential partners. For this campaign we went with “Say NO to high textbook prices” and variants thereof. The campaign was successful in some ways and not so much in others. The idea and the tagline attracted a lot of attention – the shop had a dozen or so enquiries a day at the beginning of term. We seldom had the books they needed, however.

We showed that there was a demand for cheaper textbooks and that students were interested, with minimal advertising and involvement. We just needed the books.

Since then, as our library has gotten bigger, Aloe X has been one of our stronger outlets – no doubt because of the fact that the town only has one academic bookstore, which, as academic bookstores do, charge extortionate prices.

Content, Design, Marketing

Things we’ve shipped recently

30 August 2012 Arthur Attwell

In the last three months we’ve got a few concrete things out the door.

20 June 2012: Our help site for outlets and publishers is up.
2 July: Our team (mostly Nick, really) starts producing great posters every two weeks for outlets to download and print for in-store promotion:
1 August 2012: Our full-page ad in Live Magazine is out.
30 August 2012: We finalised a very important deal with the Jetline chain of copy shops, which we reported on our blog here.

I’ve also been getting around to spread the word.

24 July 2012: Interviewed on Cape Talk drive-time radio with John Maytham.
21 July 2012: Gave a well-received talk at TEDxCapeTown. Here’s the text of the talk and here’s the video.
14 July: Presented at Talking Heads in Cape Town about Paperight (Talking Heads project page)
11 July: Spoke to an enthusiastic group of high-school kids at Enke:forum.
19 June 2012: Chaired a panel discussion with Alan Knott-Craig Jr and Gus Silber on their new book ‘Mobinomics’. Here’s the Bookslive report.
28 August 2012: I was interviewed for if:book Australia about Paperight. Here’s a snippet video, the full video interview is coming later, apparently.

A bunch of people are joining our thinking:

23 August 2012: Little interview with an enthusiastic “citizen journalist”. I posted the full text of the interview on our blog.
26 July 2012: You Magazine and Huisgenoot describe Paperight in a feature article called “No textbooks? No problem!”, a profile on Zakes Ncanywa in You Magazine and Huisgenoot, by Pieter van Zyl. (Article concept and much of the execution taken from Nick Mulgrew’s earlier piece in the Mail & Guardian, mentioned in my last quarterly report.) You and HuisGenoot have a combined readership of over 4 million.
25 July 2012: Nice pieces on the Mellville House publishing company’s blog about Paperight and the Publishing Genius Press (Baltimore) blog.
24 July 2012: Lots of re-hashing of a press release we did with Realm Digital across many IT websites, including this piece on ITWeb and half a dozen others.
Nice blog post about Paperight by Africa-tech blogger Jacques Coetzee
14 July 2012: “Desperate teachers flout copyright to help publish books”, an article in the Weekend Post (Port Elizabeth) by Barbara Hollands mentions Paperight. (We couldn’t get an electronic copy or web link sadly.)
12 July 2012: One of our champion publishers in the UK, Anthony Haynes, blogged about Paperight again.

And on my personal blog, a few Paperight-related pieces:

14 August 2012: An email interview with a publishing MA student titled ‘Trade publishing challenges in South Africa’.
8 August 2012: An interesting anecdote about textbooks in Rabat.
9 July 2012: A thorough view on why schoolbook-purchasing is broken, called ‘The weakest links in schoolbook publishing’.

Content

1000 products are listed on Paperight 0.5

28 February 2012 Tarryn-Anne Anderson 1 Comment

Arthur created a mock-up of the poster, and Michal and I assisted in proofreading and product selection, as well as providing pricing information and page extents. Once the poster was finalised, and we’d received the finished products, we were each tasked with selling the Paperight service to a nearby copyshop. Poster in hand, I signed up 3@1 Claremont – our very first registered outlet. By February 2012 we had also started advertising for a sales manager, who would take on the role of outlet sales and support.

By the end of February 2012, Michal and I reached our goal of having 1000 products listed on Paperight.com. We’d created a spreadsheet of metadata for 1001 content items, created individual product pages for each of these items, downloaded the epub/PDF files for every title (and renamed and archived these), and created Paperight Editions of the titles that were advertised on our poster so that we’d be ready to fill any orders that came in as a result of our poster advertising. We’d also designed and implemented the first phase taxonomy for the Paperight website, based on the selected categorization of products on Paperight.com, and created cover images for the titles we’d decided to promote.

The table below roughly illustrates the composition of the current Paperight products database, based on year of publication, as of February 2012.

In further trying to demonstrate to composition of the current Paperight product database, we have created three additional data visualisations. The first provides an overview of the number of books per genre, currently listed on the Paperight website. These genres are also represented as separate and searchable categories on Paperight.com. The second and third charts show the composition of sub-genres within two of the primary genres of ‘fiction’ and ‘non-fiction’.

Publishers approached

HMPG (Arthur emailed)

Publisher registrations

e-Classroom (16/2/2012)

Content, Design, Marketing

The very first Paperight Poster

31 January 2012 Tarryn-Anne Anderson

By January we were nearing completion of the content list for the first 1000 titles. It included popular classic fiction, open access educational material and matric exam packs for 2008–2011. The majority of these works were sourced by combing through lists of “popular/top”, “most downloaded”, and “most purchased” lists on various websites which sell or offer free access to public domain works. Other resources used for sourcing product leads included public domain curation and review websites, as well as compiled lists of the “best books of all time”, setwork lists, and the Nobel and Pulitzer Prize winners’ list (links to each of these resources can be found on the Paperight Wiki).

We also started brainstorming ways to market these titles to outlets, and met to discuss values, pitches, and posters. These were important initial discussions where we began the process of creating the Paperight brand identity. We decided to design a poster that we could send to registered outlets, and take with us when pitching to new outlets and publishers to make the concept more solid. It included a set of featured products that we felt would sell well to matric students and first year university students. Each product was assigned a three letter tag so that they could be found easily.

In hindsight this was a lot of work for one poster to do. We printed out 1000 posters and distributed them, but never received and visible indication that they were increasing sales.

The poster was meant to function as both a catalog and an advertisement, and assist with product discoverability. In hindsight this was a lot of work for one poster to do. We printed out 1000 posters and distributed them, but never received and visible indication that they were increasing sales. More on the poster here.