Print catalog production can be daunting. You often have to deal with product information edits, often in hand-marked PDFs with notes in the margins. You use memory or spreadsheets as your only options to keep track of every appearance of a product across multiple pages or catalogs. Print and publication deadline delays can send shockwaves across your whole production timeline.
If your design team are spending as much time manually updating and verifying product information from various sources, they are not getting the most important part of their jobs done, namely working on catalog design. Would they benefit from a direct connection between product data stores and inDesign?
You collect valuable customer insights from your other marketing channels, but your catalogs are still a bit one-size-fits all due in part because of the enormity of the production effort involved. Are you wasting money and loosing opportunity to get more targeted offerings in front of specific customer groups?
With Agility, product information on InDesign catalog pages is directly linked to the PIM and can be refreshed with live data instantly, and at the individual product level, at the discretion of the designer. The extracted files process used by other PIMs only captures a snapshot in time and must be completely re-imported to reflect the current data.
The Agility Connector for InDesign lets designers to work natively in InDesign with an extra menu to access PIM data. Drag and drop functionality speeds page construction and scripting controls how text and images flow onto the page and the character and paragraph styles applied. The Agility Lightbox shows designers all available product assets so they can make the best choice for the layout.
From US English to Canadian English to U.K. English, from dollars to euros to yen. Reduce page production time and print costs when generating additional language versions by using layers and swapping out only the black plate with language and pricing content. Smart Attributes in Agility can pass instructions to InDesign to interpret content formatting based on logic, i.e., to change the font color to red if the price is above a certain amount.
Approved page templates populated with approved PIM data means the compiled catalog is immediately ready for print, shortening publication timelines and eliminating last-minute review. Pulling data from Agility PIM allows for the quick generation and layout of time-consuming product and manufacturer indexes.
Between catalog production periods, teams can harness the power of the PIM to update product information as they go vs. all at once. Product Managers and Content Managers have time to focus on the content, pagination, and merchandising of catalog and collateral pages without the time pressure of a print deadline.
All these same capabilities and efficiencies can be applied to any content-rich collateral, allowing you to quickly produce direct mail pieces, articles, interest-based content, sell sheets, box stuffers, or packaging including specification bullets.
Catalogs will always be important to us and our customers, particularly teachers. Our research shows that they rely on the books. The improvements we made with our product content in Agility has allowed us to shorten the production cycle time. We expect to do more catalogs, not less.
