Visionary Award for Consumer Storage Product

In all of the hyperbole and hoopla fueling the social buzz of the 2012 International CES there was one newsworthy story that evaded all but the most avid journalists: the 2012 Storage Visions Conference, billed as a partner program to CES, and its annual awards presentation at the Riviera Hotel Convention Center. Of the seven product categories in the competition, the subject of this writing is the Visionary Award for Consumer Storage Product defined as: advanced development of digital storage devices and media used in electronic consumer systems.

Winning the distinction of the 2012 Visionary Award for Consumer Storage Product category was none other than Millenniata, for their M-Disc. Also named as finalists in this year’s award were Other World Computing’s Mercury Aura Pro Express 6GB SSD and OCZ Technology’s RevoDrive Hybrid PCI Express.

“We are pleased to be recognized with this award. It recognizes the need of permanent storage across many different industries and applications.”said Scott Shumway, Millenniata CEO.

The M-Disc will not degrade over time and is usable on a daily basis. It is the perfect storage solution for music, photos, video, genealogical records, business records, data loss prevention, permanent file backup, medical imaging, government usage, and for archival purposes.

The M-Disc is the first backward compatible non-dye based DVD technology constructed of inorganic materials that are known to last centuries. M-Disc compatible drives (referred to as M-Ready) are high quality optical drives specifically designed to laser-engrave digital information onto the M-Disc. This combination allows information to be written once and read over time and offers the best permanent data storage solution in the industry. The M-Disc holds 4.7GB with higher capacities in development.

Planning ahead, by proactively maintaining your CD/DVD publishing systems, will result in better performance and higher quality output.

We recently received a call from a client inquiring about how they can, proactively, maintain the drives in their aging duplication systems to make them fully compatible with modern high speed CD/DVD-R media. Although theirs aren’t really that ‘old’ its important to remember: 3 years is old for technology products… CD/DVD production systems and their recording drives are no exception.

The best place to begin is at the manufacturer’s website and looking for a Support link, then follow it to ‘System Updates’ or ‘Firmware Downloads’. Most all the leading system manufacturers, like Rimage and Vinpower, make it easy for their clients, to help them maintain everything at optimal performance.

One may ask “Why is this important”? The short answer is, ‘everything matters’. Media manufacturers are continually tweaking production parameters to optimize disc performance to match that of drive manufacturers recording capabilities. The one (and only!) constant in the media vs drive compatibility equation is the disc itself, which is tightly controlled by Philips. The same holds true for DVD.

The drives and their software have no such specifications or licensing controls and, as a result, every drive is different from the next, whether its one manufacturer to the next, or drive model to the next. What that means, is every manufacturer is free to engineer their drives any way they wish, so long as they burn a standards compliant disc that meets criteria for media interchangeability in any reader.

Notwithstanding the inevitable fact that drives age… their mechanisms, circuitry and optics become worn… the day it comes off the assembly line is the last time it was up-to-date with the CD/DVD-R media then being produced. And herein lies the necessity of regularly updating a drive’s firmware.

CD/DVD-R media have gone through evolutionary improvements in the past 5 years keeping up with new generations of recorders. The chemical engineering of recording dye has advanced dramatically to allow recorders to burn data at rates that were fantasies 15 years ago. And that is a fundamental reason why drive firmware needs to be ‘flashed’ regularly.

You see, optical media contains a lookup table of information embedded into the pre-groove area that includes the manufacturers ID, the optimal voltage settings for the laser diode to calibrate its power to and the ‘write strategy’ that sets up the drive to adjust the laser’s power as it tracks from the ID to OD of the disc to create the optical pits and lands in the proper lengths for a ‘perfect’ recording.

There is the mistaken tactic of many end-users to slow down their recorders, or run high speed media at 4X, 8X, 16X etc., in the erroneous assumption that it will result in a better quality disc. Don’t do it! Although it seems counterintuitive, it will result in worse quality recordings because high speed media isn’t designed to run slowly and it really messes up the formation of the optical pits and lands.

It may be a nuisance to upgrade firmware… and far easier to grumble about media… than engaging in proactive maintenance, but bear in mind: the media is all new… the drives are all worn! And like a car that starts missing or getting poor mileage when it isn’t maintained… it isn’t the gas… its probably a careless owner who would rather complain than maintain. Likewise with CD/DVD production systems.

More often than not, a fresh firmware update (or perhaps cleaning the drive with bottled air and lens cleaning disc!) will resolve most anomalous recorder/media issues, as well as improve your yields and productivity. In those instances when a firmware update may be less than effective, it may entail drive replacement or the acquisition of a new, up-to-date, system to get production “back in the groove”.

As reported by DMA research, Optical Discs deliver quantified results: A whopping 73% of recipients actually play discs in their computer!

The redundant ubiquity of social media has diminished its once au courant glamour in a marketer’s quiver of tools… much like spam killed the ‘open rate’ of an email centric marketing plan. This isn’t to suggest that either are ‘dead’, so much as increasingly ‘crippled’ due to both excessive internet clutter and growing consumer fatigue. The result is a ‘So what…’ jading, and they become passe.

In response to the apparent burn out, the Direct Marketing Association (DMA), in collaboration with DiscMail Direct, a trade coalition, conducted research in 2010 of the predominant marketing options for pitching a sales presentation to gauge the effectiveness of optical discs vs email vs social media.

What they uncovered was quite enlightening and suggests that CDs & DVDs are far from losing their place in the marketing mix for companies seeking quantifiably effective results. See below.

• 91% of all respondents who received a DVD/CD in the mail opened the mailer
• A whopping 73% of them actually played the discs in their computer
• 59% of respondents believe that a DVD/CD is more secure than email
• Of all respondents, 85% prefer a DVD/CD in the mail than an email by the same advertiser
• 89% of respondents would spend more time with a direct mail piece if it included a DVD/CD

The DMA study dovetails perfectly with the findings of a similar survey conducted several years ago when compact discs were competing primarily with print media such as post cards, catalogues, etc. What this translates to for corporate marketers, small business owners and ad agency professionals is that optical discs should be at the core of all cross-channel marketing efforts through the use of interactive, web-enabled content to increase their effective stickiness factor for targeted consumers.

Looking back through our ad archives we found this from those heady days when CD was king and gas was cheap.

Our last entry generated a flurry of feedback, but not one word about paper USB Flash drives. It was instead about marketing with CD and DVD versus USB Flash… both by Direct Mail and as Trade Show handouts and Mr. Sewell’s musing that discs ‘seem so 1990s’. Yipes! Did he mean they’re not sexy?

The primary thoughts touched on several considerations when proposing a marketing campaign to a client: cost, novelty, capacity, versatility, and functionality. Ad men have long embraced CDs as being among the most attractive forms of marketing communication because they afford three significant benefits: they’re secure, tangible and portable. And equally compelling… CDs enabled rich media.

In the past year and a half we have observed a shift in electronic marketing that appears grounded in the realization that websites are of little value when they’re lost in search engines. Discs solve that.

Discs also offer graphic designers real branding S-P-A-C-E on their expansive surface area. USB just can’t compete, in either the branding area or the creative opportunity the CD’s surface presents as a designer’s playground. USB drives are printed in one or two colors. Discs are full color, wall-to-wall.

However, the crux of their love for discs is borne out in the comparative cost differential between a 4GB Flash drive and a 5GB DVD. On any given day, purchasing 500 4GB Flash drives will cost about $8.50 each, whereas 500 DVD5 will cost only about $.79 each. That’s dramatic, but its the extended cost where dramatic becomes glaring: 500 4GB USB drives: $4250.00 vs 500 DVD5 $395.00.

Onerous as a 1000% price difference is, that’s not what makes ad men mad men; its the fact that a USB drive and its contents (the meat and potatoes of a client’s investment in a marketing campaign) cannot be secured. Those wonderful little USB Flash drives, a.k.a. trade show swag, are ‘repurposed’ to personal use and its mission critical marketing presentation gets unceremoniously deleted. Ouch!

Promoted as "the First Paper Integrated" USB Drive.

An interesting article by Howard J. Sewell, publisher of The Point blog, a B2B marketing veteran of some twenty years, recently came across my desk in which he touts the resurgence of Direct Mail marketing, based on the fact spam killed email as a B2B marketing and lead generation tool.

Mr. Sewell goes on to point out that the problem with traditional Direct Mail is it’s a clunky medium when it underpins an electronic marketing campaign, due to the fact that it requires recipients to do some fairly tedious keyboard work to access the promoted website.

That nuisance was overcome by direct mail/marketing campaigns using CD-ROMs that self-launched and automatically connected the recipient to a marketers website but… he laments, “CD-ROM seems so 1990′s these days” compared to USB Flash drives.

And this is where he makes his point of departure to a product called USB Insert… a proprietary USB Flash drive product that is crafted between a couple printed sheets of thin card stock, cut to shape, and mounted into a matching die-cut card stock folder or similar paperboard mailer.

A paper USB sounds like an interesting twist… but let’s consider the practicality of this nifty idea.

USB Flash, in and of itself, is a spendy marketing tool especially considering its cost per MegaByte. This presents a challenge for marketeers when compounded by its perpetual price volatility; many campaigns take so long to develop that price jumps at the time of release often kill affordability.

The costs mount when you combine a proprietary, non-standard, media configuration with novelty die-cuts for single-use throw-away marketing. In terms of its stickiness… what does one do with a USB Flash drive made of thin card stock made to look like a brown prescription bottle?

Contrast that with a standardized USB Flash drive: they can be direct-mailed in any standard media mailer, use any standard data-loading method, can be procured in any quantity and, because they are standard, are delivered in just days, not months, as is the case with a proprietary scheme.

What does one do with a paper drive after its 10 minutes of novelty has worn off? Unlike a standard USB Flash drive, its a good bet, before too long its tossed into the trash and on its way to a landfill. Think Green… standard USB Flash makes sense.

Brand synergy: Telvent's USB Flash Drives & silk-screen printed DVD-R distribution media.

One of the outstanding perks we at ISODISC enjoy is the privilege of working with some of the best graphic designers and media savvy marketeers in the business. Each week sees dozens of electronic media projects pass through our facility showcasing creative energy that runs from ‘the stunning to the sublime’– most projects include custom printed sleeves coordinated with the artwork of the disc. Recent trends have heralded a surge in the number of projects that include USB Flash drives tied-in to silkscreened CDs/DVDs to maximize brand synergy across multiple distribution media platforms.

One such project is pictured above: produced by the creative minds at Telvent who have developed a cohesive package of marketing collateral to showcase their Smart Grid product. The synergy of these pieces is further enhanced at their website, which builds on the same look and feel, as well as color, images and energy. Smart marketers know that “nothing succeeds like success”; with a good design team and collateral that reinforces brand synergy, success is much easier to reach. As you plan new CD/DVD/USB Flash projects let ISODISC help build your brand synergy and optimize your ROI.

ISODISC/Flagship Adventures DVD - See inset of disc inserted in folder slot.

ISODISC was recently tapped to provide discs to Sir Speedy of (98 North Washington Street) Boston, MA for a special marketing packet that had been developed for Flagship Adventures, an adrenaline pumping RIB thrill purveyor. The project included printed leaflets and a DVD in a nautically themed pocket folder. Sir Speedy’s client was thrilled with the results and, judging solely from the spot-on color fidelity between the DVD and the folder and the tight packaging integration with the disc, its easy to see why. Flagship’s DVD practically disappears into the pocket folder – take a look! Project Manager Rafe Hershfield, expressed it succinctly saying, “The DVD’s look great, thank you! This is the total package.” Its a fine example of how finely tuned ISODISC’s Chromatix Color Process is for projects requiring accurate color. And, its worth pointing out, it was accomplished without a client provided print sample to match for DVD silkscreen-press setup and also serves as reference to the printing and finishing capability of Rafe and the crew at Sir Speedy, Boston. A job well done guys. Now, how about an adrenaline pumping thrill ride in one of those high-speed inflatables?

Dave Wingert of KGOR 99.9 FM presents a Wing Ding T-shirt to Patty Keith of ISODISC.

Overcoming intense competition, ISODISC was recently awarded the eminent “Wing Ding Monday” after being selected as a “coolest” place to work by Dave Wingert, DJ from KGOR radio in Omaha. Dave’s “top of the morning” chat show is a perennial favorite, celebrating a nationwide broadcast career spanning four decades, which now makes its “home” (again!) weekday mornings in Omaha. Go-to girl Patty Keith single-handedly lead the ISODISC team into the winning slot after presenting a compelling profile of the company and the “cool” characters she works with. Dave arrived with his cameraman Kevin and the Wing Ding prize, a sumptuous gourmet lunch courtesy of Gerda’s German Restaurant and Bakery! Special thanks to Patty, Dave, Kevin and Gerda’s for a memorable Wing Ding Monday at ISODISC! Dial-in to Dave weekday mornings 5:30AM-12:00PM at 99.9 FM.