Bottom Line February 2015

THE BUZZ

CASE STUDY

TYING THE KNOT

Industry trends that your business needs to know to survive p. 20

An environmental affairs department boosts recreational tourism with a durable map that easily fits in a kayaker’s pack p. 18

The path to merger bliss usually doesn’t begin with the haste of a Vegas weddingp. 12

MARKETING AUTOMATION IS

HOT!hot, hot,

B O T T O ML I N Ep r o v i d i n g b u s i n e s s i n n o v a t i o n s

THEMARKETING AUTOMATION WAY

Turn to page 2, or call Shaynie at 989.891.1710

Deliver the right message to the right person at the right time—and we will deliver sales-ready leads to your sales professionals.

THE OLD WAY

blogs

landing pages

direct mail

social media

publications

outbound phone calls

email

text messages

The challenges we, as CEOs, CFOs, CMOs, and other business leaders, face today are multifaceted and complex. We’re often asked to do more with less. That’s where maximizing return on dollars invested in marketing and business development efforts is crucial. In Bottom Line, we present a number of practical, innovative ideas that can help you drive revenue and reduce costs.

Bullet-deflecting wrist cuffs. Armored shields. We’d all like superhero powers to guard our organization from the dangers of

economic downturns, fickle customers, and suspect employees. In this issue of Bottom Line, we’ll show you ways to help bulletproof your bottom line—no cape or tights required.

Take for example the feature story on marketing automation (page 2). It tells of a powerful technology tool designed to develop new customers, enhance relationships, and retain existing customers by effectively marketing on multiple channels and automating repetitive tasks. Find what you need to know to harness its power and achieve measurable, meaningful results.

Shoring up your market position may also require a merger. Whether you’re acquiring, being acquired, or simply want to position yourself for future growth, “Tying the Knot” (page 12) helps you consider the surprising benefits and drawbacks. And, we look at challenges and opportunities of bringing two corporate cultures together.

Paper itself often needs superpower capabilities, as you’ll see in our Case Study (page 18) about an environmental affairs department that needed a water- and tear-resistant, portable map for kayakers exploring a rugged shoreline trail. Plus, the seedier side of document fraud and the state-of-the-art security paper and printing techniques being deployed to fight it come to light in “The Buzz” (page 20).

Finally, in “Overheard” (page 10), you can tap into the power of X-ray vision with a well-executed customer survey. See what’s on your customers’ minds and start making better business decisions as a result.

This issue of Bottom Line is packed with tips, strategies, and insights designed to strengthen your bottom line. As always, we welcome your thoughts and feedback.

Bulletproof Your Bottom Line.LETTER FROM THE PUBLISHER

Contents

OVERHEARDHow well do you know your customers? If you’re not regularly surveying them, they may be strangers to you.

10 THE BUZZGovernments and businesses deploy defensive, high-tech paper and printing techniques to combat document fraud.

20CASE STUDYIdeas that work: An environmental affairs department boosts recreational tourism with a durable, portable map that easily fits in a camper’s or kayaker’s pack.

18

Bottom Line, Volume 4, Issue 1, February 15 (ISSN 1550-8064) is published by Great Lakes Bay Publishing, 1311 Straits Dr, Bay City, MI 48706. Periodicals postage pending at Bay City, MI. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to Great Lakes Bay Publishing, P.O. Box 925, Bay City, MI 48707. Copyright © 2014 Great Lakes Bay Publishing. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or part without permission is prohibited.

Fritz [email protected]

PUBLISHER: Fritz Horak, [email protected] THE F.P. HORAK COMPANY CHIEF MARKETING OFFICER: Marisa Horak Belotti, [email protected]

EDITOR: Mimi Bell, [email protected] | ART DIRECTOR: Chad Hussle, [email protected]

PHOTOGRAPHER: Doug Julian, [email protected]

MARKETING AUTOMATION IS HOT, HOT, HOT! DON’T BE LEFT OUT IN THE COLD.In a world where the average consumer can be reached via multiple media channels, companies are scrambling to engage their prospects when and how the prospects desire. Here’s how to do it.2

TYING THE KNOTThe path to merger bliss usually doesn’t begin with the haste of a Vegas wedding.12

THIS ISSUE PRINTED ON:

Cover: 100# Flo Gloss CoverText: 80# Flo Gloss Text

FRITZ HORAK

THE F.P. HORAK COMPANY IS THE PARENT COMPANY OF MONARCH PRINT SOLUTIONS AND PROGRADE.

BOTTOM LINE V4:1 | 1

THEMARKETING AUTOMATION WAY

Turn to page 2, or call Shaynie at 989.891.1710

Deliver the right message to the right person at the right time—and we will deliver sales-ready leads to your sales professionals.

THE OLD WAY

blogs

landing pages

direct mail

social media

publications

outbound phone calls

email

text messages

Marketing Automation is

Don’t Be Left Out in the Cold.

Hot, Hot, HOT!

2 | BOTTOM LINE V4:1

feature

In a world where the average consumer can be reached via mult iple media channels, companies are scrambling to engage their prospects when and how the prospects desire. Here’s how to do it .

BY LAURIE HILEMAN

emember when your marketing campaign consisted of mailing three postcards followed by a call from your salesperson?

Yeah, me neither.With the average American consumer

available on seven—yes, seven!—different media channels (for example, landline and mobile devices, social media, email, direct mail, etc.), today’s marketers need to know how to cut through the proliferation of digital and print communications to ensure their brand is reaching the right people at the right time with the right message.

R Easier said than done. A recent study by Harris Interactive indicates consumers are bombarded with messages. It shows 82 percent ignore online ads altogether. They’re simply tuning out, overwhelmed by the sheer proliferation of digital communications.

“All marketers have to recognize and realize that marketing as we know it has changed,” says Joe Manos, executive vice president at MindFireInc, a worldwide leader of marketing intelligence software and services with headquarters in Irvine, California.

“Based on this change in consumer behavior, marketing automation becomes more important as a nurturing strategy to build the trust and awareness to engage the consumer in a more effective manner and on their terms,” Manos says.

The task of marketing in today’s digital age is a bit like eating an elephant. Where do you begin?

That’s where marketing automation comes in. The combination of technology and tactics helps marketers integrate and automate marketing across print, online, mobile, and social media channels. While the toolsets have been around in various forms for several years, the need is greater than ever before.

Here’s a closer look at how organizations use marketing automation to fuel customer acquisition, retention, and growth—and how you can, too.


feature

DIGGING INBefore making the investment, understand that marketing automation is not a silver bullet that will “automatically” make your job easier as a marketer. You don’t get to buy a few mailing lists, plug in your email database, press enter, and—voila!— new customers come popping out the other end. Like any new tool or tactic, the results you get out are directly correlated to the effort you put in.

Start first with a clear, manageable plan. Manos offers the following considerations when formulating a marketing automation program:

• What’s the No. 1 objective for your initial program?• What’s the size of the team that will be working with the program?• How much of their day will be spent working with your program?• Does your sales and marketing process quantify lead quality?• How do you pass leads to the sales team?• Have you mapped the process for the different types of inquiries and responses?

Once you have identified some of the key objectives, Manos recommends finding a partner, such as a print or marketing services provider with proven experience in marketing automation, to help guide and coach you on the important launch activities necessary to achieve your initial objective.

In addition to the expertise that partners can bring to the table, they often bring another valuable resource: the technology. Unless your organization has the expertise and resources available to devote to successful, ongoing marketing automation initiatives, it may not be to your benefit to invest in the cloud-based software yourself.

Regardless of whether you elect to work with a partner or go it alone, investing the time and energy upfront to develop the right strategy with the right support is the cornerstone to success.

“The fail ing point of most marketers [ is] they don’t stop the si lo marketing. One person’s sending emails, one person’s doing direct mail , [and] another person is doing social media. They don’t align those functions into an integrated approach.”~ Joe Manos, executive vice president, MindFireInc


Companies are much farther ahead by aligning all individual marketing efforts in one coordinated effort that uses the marketing intell igence data gathered on prospects to the best advantage.

3 350 7 1


ENGAGE ON YOUR PROSPECTS’ TERMS With your overall objective clearly defined, it’s time to start zeroing in on the individual components of the campaign. Successful marketing automation programs engage targeted audiences on their own terms. Therefore, you need to understand the right program design and the right processes for when you reach out to prospects and how you reach out to them.

“Today, the consumer is in control,” says Manos. “They can do much of their research before contacting a potential business [to inquire about purchasing their product or service]. As such, marketers have to become pro-active and start a dialogue with each customer or prospect, and build the trust, confidence, and awareness of how the company is a good fit for their needs.”

In the past, leads generated from direct mail campaigns and other marketing efforts were given directly over to the sales team when the prospects were, in many cases, just in the very early stages of researching what products or services might mesh with their objectives. “It’s a waste of time,” warns Manos. “Ninety-five percent of the leads that you create, those responses, they’re not sales-ready. If you’re giving non-sales-ready leads to your sales team, you’re wasting your marketing dollars.”

Companies are much farther ahead by aligning all individual marketing efforts in one coordinated effort that uses the marketing intelligence data gathered on prospects to the best advantage. Typical B2B marketing automation capabilities encompass email, web behavior tracking, landing pages, nurture campaigns, lead scoring, analytics, and social media marketing.

Prospects in the initial research phase may get a coordinated set of messages based on their immediate needs and the particular industry to which they belong, while other prospects farther along in the sales pipeline are getting more in-depth content and offers. “Keep in mind that today’s leading marketers are using four to five [communication] channels per program because the average prospect in North America is available on 7.2 [communication] channels,” says Manos.

“What you try to do is automate those repetitive tasks that marketers and sales organizations have, automate the marketing functions, and have a much more strategic and personalized, very targeted ongoing marketing engagement with your prospects and customers,” says Manos. “This increases the efficiency of the marketing organizations, reduces human error, and aligns marketing and sales processes for more effective program results.”

feature


TEST, MEASURE, TWEAK, REPEATOverwhelmed by the possibilities? Don’t be.

“You don’t want to eat the elephant in one bite, right? You do want to start small,” says Manos, of an organization’s initial marketing automation program. Fortunately, a key strength of marketing automation lies in tracking and measuring results, allowing you to easily make course corrections to get even better results.

“The built-in tracking tools measuring response rates, click-throughs, and other actionable items make tweaking the process, content creation, and program design simple and effective,” says Manos.

Which email headline garnered the best response rate? What prompts the most click-throughs? By leveraging only the parts of each campaign that work the best, you can tweak the ones that offer modest gains, and dump the ones that aren’t working. You’ll want to take action and test. Again and again.

“This is the failing point of most marketers. They buy the technology, they don’t get their data out of silos, they don’t stop the silo marketing, one person’s sending emails, one person’s doing direct mail, [and] another person is doing social media,” Manos says. “They don’t align those functions into an integrated approach, and so that, coupled with [not having] aligned their sales and marketing processes, creates a real bottleneck from achieving the results they seek.”

So…grab a fork and knife and prepare to dig in. Once you’ve identified your ideal customer profile, know the attributes those ideal customers possess, understand how you can leverage those attributes, and engage with them on their terms. You’ll soon be well on your way to generating more qualified leads.

At the end of the day, the strength in marketing automation is in the nurturing and scoring of the leads part of the process. “That’s what the technology does,” says Manos. “You’re able to pass off to your sales team sales-ready leads, so they’re more productive. It reduces the days-to-sale for the sales team, which means the results are better and the return on investment for your marketing investment is higher.”

PAUL ADLER is director of marketing solutions for The F.P. Horak Company. Using new and traditional media and technology, he creates integrated and relevant marketing programs for diverse client groups. Contact Paul at 989-891-1749, or by emailing [email protected].

Learn the language of streamlining the sales and marketing processes

TOOLS OF THE MARKETING AUTOMATION TRADE

BY LAURIE HILEMAN

[With technology]“you’re able to pass off to your sales team sales-ready leads, so they’re more productive.”~ Joe Manos


feature

Marketers, particularly those at small- to mid-sized organizations, face challenges on many digital fronts. They often have difficulty accessing the technology, time, and marketing expertise associated with new media capabilities, and they grapple with increasingly stretched and limited resources.

That’s why savvy marketers are using marketing automation to streamline the sales and marketing processes by replacing high-touch, repetitive manual processes with automated solutions. Whether they want to accelerate sales, cross-sell, or even reactivate dormant customers, the results offer a greater—and easily measured—ROI than traditional methods.

Here’s a look at a few of the tools—and terminology—available through marketing automation software:

LANDING PAGES: A place to where prospects are directed (usually from a postcard, email, blog post, social media post, etc.) and prompted to fill out a form to receive a free offering. Marketers use the gathered intelligence to help target future messages to the prospect.

DYNAMIC CONTENT: A wide variety of offerings from eBooks, whitepapers, and blog posts to articles, case studies, and FAQs that are designed to help nurture prospects. Content can be offered in a variety of ways based on a prospect’s preferences.

LEAD QUALIFICATION: The automated process of qualifying leads based on the actions being taken by prospects as a result of various marketing touches.

TRIGGER-BASED MARKETING:Depending on the actions taken by a prospect, marketing automation software adjusts messages accordingly throughout a campaign.

LOCATION-BASED MARKETING: The ability to send targeted offers to a person’s mobile device when he or she is near a business that is incentivizing them to visit.

The conversion paths from prospect, to customer, to repeat customer are as unique as prospects themselves. No matter what path your prospects choose to take, marketing automation helps ensure your organization is easy to find.

H O W W E L L D O Y O U K N O WY O U R C U S T O M E R S ?

overheard

S

If you’re not regularly surveying them, they may be strangers to you

BY MARTHA SPIZZIRI

urveys that gauge customer satisfaction and explore their core concerns serve many purposes: They can help fine-tune your marketing message, provide testimonials for

you to use in promoting your business, and aid in R&D efforts to improve your existing products and services—and help you develop new ones.

You may think you already know what your customers want, but a survey never fails to turn up a few surprises, says marketing expert Jeanne Hurlbert, CEO of customer-research firm My Survey Expert.

Types of surveysOnline surveys work best in most cases. They’re easy for the user to complete, and they save work for you in compiling results because no one has to type in data.

Paper surveys can help brick-and-mortar businesses to get on-the-spot feedback. The downside: The data tend to skew negative, according to market-research firm iPerceptions. It’s best to use this type of feedback tactically.

Social media conversations (for example, dialogue posted on your company’s Facebook page) can provide quick, free feedback. But the results can be hard to quantify, and you may not get a large enough sample to be meaningful, according to a blog post by Rieva Lesonsky, CEO and president of GrowBiz Media, on the U.S. Small Business Association website. And if you’re doing research to guide overall strategy, representative data based on random sampling is a must, says iPerceptions.

Should you offer incentives?“Absolutely,” says Hurlbert. She suggests offering two: a free gift, such as a white paper, that each survey-taker gets immediately, and a chance to win a bigger reward. This could be one of a number of iPads or $50 gift cards offered, depending on your survey campaign budget.

If you’re seeking a simple, quick response from visitors who visit your website, an incentive isn’t necessary, says iPerceptions. If you do one, do so at the end of the survey to avoid biased results.

Use the dataSurvey data should be used throughout the organization. That includes applying what you’ve learned to marketing and social media efforts, product improvements, enhancing customer service, and, internally, toward improving employee performance.

“Find the story in the data and use that story to solve problems and augment strengths,” Hurlbert says.

Plan to keep surveying customers over time to track improvements—and to report back to customers with the results. Show how you’ll use the information for the customers’ benefit, says Hurlbert. That will build customer engagement while increasing the odds they’ll respond to future surveys.


T Y I N G


feature

as Vegas is known as the marriage capital of the world because it’s easy and affordable to get hitched there. You can get a marriage license downtown any day before midnight without a blood test (or sobriety test), and there are thousands of affordable, readily available wedding options: drive-thru weddings, Elvis-themed weddings, helicopter weddings. The latest trend—recently spotlighted on the Shark Tank TV series—is the Wedding Wagon. Touted to be as easy as ordering a pizza, you can place your order online and the company sends a van—adorned with purple curtains, an LED-lit altar, and cascading flowers—a licensed minister, and a professional photographer to the Las Vegas location of your choice for only $129.

Recent studies indicate that there is no correlation between the cost of the wedding and the length of the marriage; however, there is plenty of reason to believe that longer courtships—much

longer than a Vegas weekend—lead to longer marriages. One of the country’s leading experts on corporate mergers, Andrew J. Sherman, asserts that merging corporations could benefit from longer courtships as well.

The path to merger bl iss usual ly doesn’t begin with the haste of a Vegas wedding BY LORRIE BRYAN

T Y I N G

L

THE KNOT


BEATING THE ODDSMost mergers begin with high hopes, but then the reality sets in. “Reports are indicating that 60 to 70 percent of mergers fail to meet pre-closing objectives within three years of closing. If that is true, that’s horrendous. We have got to do better than that,” says Sherman, who has served as a legal and strategic advisor to dozens of Fortune 500 companies and hundreds of emerging growth companies. “A good merger is like a good marriage, but these days some mergers are more like Vegas weddings. Sometimes you have to act fast. But we need to get back to longer courtships with time for the corporations to get to know each other and make sure that the merger makes sense.”

What should companies be focusing on during courtship? Sherman, a senior partner at Jones Day, a prominent international law firm, and author of Acquisitions and Mergers

from A to Z, says there are three things that are essential for a successful merger: added stakeholder value, a clear plan for accretiveness, and a post-merger integration plan.

STAKEHOLDER VALUEThe key principle behind merging two companies is to create shareholder value over and above that of the sum of the two companies, but that objective is not enough to ensure ultimate success. “It has to drive stakeholder value as well. The world is now defined more broadly than just the shareholders of this company. You have to consider whether the deal makes sense for the various stakeholders in the ecosystem—employees, customers, and suppliers as well as investors. That is always a complex situation and requires some lengthy analysis,” advises Sherman.


feature

TIM DUST is the president of The F.P. Horak Company. He suggests that there are many good reasons for growing your business through an acquisition or merger. Contact Tim at 989-891-1801, or by emailing [email protected].

ACCRETIVENESSA transaction that results in profitability for the acquirer is classified as accretive, whereas one that does not, either early on or later, is more dilutive. “There has to be a clear path to accretiveness,” Sherman says. “When considering a merger, you need to know what the game plan is: the business proposition for accretiveness.”

POST-MERGER INTEGRATIONVegas elopements aside, many couples get so engrossed in planning their wedding that they forget about planning their marriage. The same can be said of corporate marriages;

companies focus on the legal transactions and fail to develop a strategy for handling post-merger challenges. Most deals look great on paper, but few organizations pay proper attention to the integration process—that is, how the deal will actually work once all the paperwork is signed. It is often at this critical time that mergers fail, Sherman affirms. “Culture, leadership, governance, IT systems, compensation packages, basic logistics—all of these issues are challenges that need to be considered before the merger is finalized.”

A longer courtship will also give companies a chance to get to know each other better and determine if they are compatible. The country’s leading relationship services provider, eHarmony, uses a patented Compatibility Matching System® to pair eHarmony members most likely to enjoy a long-term relationship. Sherman suggests that companies slated for merger should put more emphasis on compatibility, and cites the unsuccessful AOL-Time Warner merger. “It failed due to lack of good implementation. The company cultures were very different, and there was no way to get them the same, even though it looked like a match made in heaven on paper,” he says. Incompatible technologies can also lead to dissolution. In 2005, eBay decided to buy Skype for $2.6 billion, and sold it four years later for $1.9 billion. Unfortunately, as PC World reported, eBay and Skype were unable to successfully integrate their technological systems.

HAPPILY EVER AFTEROne of the largest ($75.3 billion) and most successful mergers in recent history, the Exxon-Mobile merger of 1999, reflects not only the length of the courtship, but the depth and breadth, Sherman notes. “One of the keys to the success was an extensive detailed post-integration plan with a checklist that was thousands of pages long.” Exxon-Mobil went on to post the biggest annual profits in U.S. corporate history with earnings of $45.2 billion in 2008, and nearly broke that record in 2012 with $44.9 billion.

Merging can be an alluring way to grow your business, but the most successful companies are willing to take a step back and explore whether M&A is the best option before racing to tie the knot. Sometimes, building your capacity through internal research and development or borrowing resources through strategic partnerships or alliances is a much better bet. “If you rush into something, you may wake up the next day wondering what you were thinking,” Sherman adds.


Here are some of the perceived benefits when companies merge:

GREATER EFFICIENCYGreater efficiency comes when duplicity is eliminated. When companies merge, frequently they have an opportunity to combine locations or reduce operating costs by integrating and streamlining support functions.

ECONOMIES OF SCALEA larger company has more purchasing power than two smaller ones. It has greater negotiating power and can secure deeper discounts when buying larger quantities. When the companies merge, combined production is done on a much larger scale, and when the output production increases, there are strong chances that the cost of production per unit of output gets reduced. ADDITIONAL PRODUCTS, SERVICES, AND CAPABILITIESTwo firms may be able to combine their products or services to gain a competitive edge over others in the marketplace. For example, in 2008, Hewlett-Packard bought Electronic Data Systems to strengthen the

services side of its technology offerings (this deal was valued at about $13.9 billion). Sometimes by buying a smaller company with unique technologies, a large company can maintain or develop a competitive edge. Often this is the easiest way to bring needed expertise in house.

IMPROVED MARKET REACHCompanies buy companies to reach new markets and grow revenues and earnings. “Success is measured by the metric that the company and market put in place,” corporate merger expert Andrew J. Sherman explains. “Some people criticized Facebook’s $19 billion purchase of WhatsApp because there was no clear path to monetize it. Regardless, Facebook considered the acquisition a success because it quickly gained 500 million new users. That was the metric the company used to define success.”

SURVIVALIt’s never easy for a company to willingly give up its identity to another company, but sometimes it is the only way to survive. Many companies used mergers and acquisitions to grow and survive during the global financial crisis from 2008 to 2012.

W H Y T I E T H E K N OT?


5 M&A benefits BY LORRIE BRYAN

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An environmental affairs department boosts recreational tourism with a durable, portable map that easi ly f its in a camper’s or kayaker’s pack BY MARTHA SPIZZIRI

BLAZING A TRAIL

Ideas That Work:


case study

BackgroundWater quality began to drastically improve in the late 1980s, thanks to the efforts of government agencies and local volunteer groups. Water-treatment upgrades, tighter regulations, wetlands preservation, and other measures have transformed the Saginaw Bay and Saginaw River. The Saginaw Bay is now a body of water wildly popular with outdoors enthusiasts, clean enough for boating and fishing.

Michigan’s Bay County Environmental Affairs & Community Development Department, one of the groups involved in the water-quality turnaround and conservation efforts, helped map out and improve boat launch points, shoreline camping spots, and other points of historical or recreational interest to form a “blueways trail” that can be enjoyed by boaters and campers.

ProblemSeven or eight years ago, the environmental affairs department was routinely fielding calls from unhappy Michiganders who were complaining about beach closings. Now those calls have stopped, says Laura Ogar, the department’s director. Instead, the phone calls are from people wanting to know where they can launch a kayak or canoe. The department’s challenge now was to let people know about the resources and amenities available to them on and around the bay.

SolutionThe department’s solution was to print a map of the Saginaw Bay Blueways Trail. But not just any map. This map had to be practical for boaters and campers. That meant it had to be able to get wet—without the ink running or the map itself falling to pieces.

“We wanted this to withstand the purpose it was intended [for], and that is to get people out on the water,” notes Ogar.

The map also had to contain detailed information about campgrounds, boating facilities, and orienting landmarks all around the bay. Yet it had to be small enough to fit easily in a pocket or backpack. And Ogar wanted the paper to feel like paper, not plastic.

The department worked with The F.P. Horak Company, a Bay City, Michigan-based full-service print and marketing communications services provider, to find the right materials for the job. The company identified a water-resistant paper, Paper Tyger, that not only feels like “regular” paper, but was

DARRIN DEMOTT is the vice president of manufacturing for The F.P. Horak Company. He helps customers achieve desirable results on their print projects by recommending unique paper stocks, accent embossing, foil stamping, and finishing techniques. Contact Darrin at 989-891-1832, or by emailing [email protected].

less costly than other water-resistant options. In addition, it didn’t require special inks for printing, as some other paper choices would have. And the standard soy-based inks used for printing contain UV-inhibitors that don’t fade quickly in sunlight—an important consideration for a piece that would be used by outdoors enthusiasts.

Speaking of the map’s durability factor, Ogar says, “This (map) was meant to last. Hopefully, it’ll be passed on and on.”

The F.P. Horak Company worked closely with the department in developing the map. Archived maps

from the agency’s geographical information systems were turned into PDFs for printing and used as a base to which key icons, insets, and logos were added.

The department had collaborated with the Bay County Historical Society to get details on historical sites along the trail. But Ogar and The F.P. Horak Company soon realized that there was so much information that could be added, it was impossible to fit it all on the map. A clever solution was to include a QR code that directed visitors to bonus material, such as a tour of historical points of interest, or information about where to get a burger and a beer after a tough day of paddling the bay.

The resulting map is 11 inches by 17 inches at full size, and folds down to 3 inches by 5 inches.

“On the cover, it says ‘Go ahead, get wet: printed on water resistant paper,’” says Ogar. “And we did need to put that on there, we found, because when you feel this stuff (the paper stock), it feels like normal paper.”

ResultsThe department printed 28,000 copies of its Saginaw Bay Blueways Trail map late last summer. Ogar says that, so far, they’ve distributed only limited quantities to communities surrounding the bay. The plan is to do a more coordinated push in coming months, supplying maps to sporting-goods stores, tourism bureaus, chambers of commerce, campgrounds, and the like.

“It’s also a promotional piece for general recreation,” Ogar points out. “Our economic development people love it.” She says the convention and visitors bureau wants copies of the map made available at the regional airport. “It’s really serving as much more than just a water-trail map,” Ogar says. “This is our ground-zero, baseline piece to show our area off as a waterfront recreational place—a destination.”

rom the 1960s well into the ’80s, the water in and around Michigan’s Saginaw Bay was suspect. Sewage overflows into the Saginaw River had compromised the quality of the bay. Advisories against eating fish from the bay were almost a regular occurrence. Not surprisingly, it wasn’t a popular recreation spot.F


the buzz

The Fight Against FakesGovernments and businesses deploy defensive, high-tech paper and printing techniques to combat document fraud

The gritty battle to maintain document integrity is a never-ending sequence of strikes and counter-strikes. Low-cost digital computers, copiers, scanners, and printers make so-called “desktop counterfeiters” a constant threat to negotiable and non-negotiable secure documents such as passports, drivers’ licenses, vehicle titles, transcripts, checks, and money orders.

And while document fraud itself may seem relatively harmless, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement considers it a “gateway crime” that paves the way for more sinister offenses such as identity theft, human smuggling and trafficking, gang activity, financial fraud, illegal immigration, terrorism, and other national security threats.

In response, the paper and printing industries are continually creating new overt and covert security features, the likes of which would make James Bond drool. By layering paper-based and print-based security features, their goal is to preserve the integrity and authenticity of important documents.

BY LAURIE HILEMAN

ESTIMATED COST TO BUSINESSES FROM LOST INCOME DUE TO COUNTERFEITING, FORGERY, AND OTHER FORMS OF DOCUMENT FRAUD, ACCORDING TO THE INTERNATIONAL ANTI-COUNTERFEITING COALITION.

$600 BILLION

The (Fake) Benjamin Reigns SupremeWhile the most heavily counterfeited banknote in the United States is the $20 bill, outside our borders it’s all about the Benjamin.

Two-thirds of the $100 notes in circulation circulate outside the U.S.

Of the US$1.15 trillion in general currency in public use, roughly 1 percent of that figure is believed to be counterfeit.

Sources: www.ice.gov/document-benefit-fraud www.gpo.gov/pdfs/customers/security_glossary.pdfwww.banknotenews.com/files/f1de3ad2e3cec2ddf0a2422a8f48aa43-2903.php

NUMBER OF DIFFERENT STATUTES IN THE U. S. CRIMINAL CODE COVERING FRAUDS SUCH FORGERY AND COUNTERFEITING.45

6 Common Security Features

SECURITY PAPER: embedded threads and watermarks

SPECIAL INKS AND COATINGS: color shifting and fluorescent inks or coatings

COMPLEX IMAGING: fine line graphical backgrounds and borders, and micro-printing

SECURE APPLIQUES: holographic or prismatic images, and foils

ADD-ONS: magnetic stripes and RFID chips that contain bearer or other unique information

CHANGEABLE CONTENT: check digit numbering and images that alter after copying


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Bottom Line February 2015

Documents

Transcript of Bottom Line February 2015