CD-ROM business CARDS - Statistical Data Included

Brandweek, April 16, 2001 by Hugh M. Aoki

When was the last time your business card closed a sale for you?

Imagine that you are one of a dozen sales executives trying to win the account of a major client. How do you make yourself stand out from the crowd?

Or, say you're at a trade show, literally surrounded by your competition. How do you position yourself so that your potential customers only remember you and forget about everyone else?

Get ready for a dynamic and clever solution. It's called a CD-ROM business card and it's one of the smartest marketing tools to come along in quite some time.

At its shiny core, it's a full-fledged CDROM--packed with video, sound, music, search functions, interactive navigation and tons of data--all compressed into the size and shape of a traditional business card.

Put another way, it's a multi-media marketing sales pitch that fits in a shirt pocket.

While your competitors hand out plain paper business cards, try handing out some of these nifty little high-tech wonders to your customers and see what happens. Typical reactions include surprise, intrigue, and fascination. When you tell them they can play it in their CD-ROM drive, some people react as if you just gave them a gift. When was the last time someone got excited when you gave them your business card?

That kind of genuine enthusiasm translates into a very crucial willingness to view your marketing presentation. No one gets excited about a print brochure. But a high-tech business card will get you in the door, into their CD-ROM drive and into their decision-making consciousness. Give them something out of the ordinary, give them something unique, and you've got a willing audience.

All of this translates into competitive advantage, high response rates, and increased sales.

Compact, Powerful and Versatile

A CD-ROM business card holds approximately 40MB of information. This translates into as much as 100 minutes of interactive presentation, depending on the media format you choose to utilize. A Shockwave Flash animation sequence, for instance, can be as long as 100 minutes, but full-screen video (like a television commercial or a film trailer) will max out the space limitations at 3-1/2 minutes. Still, 40MB gives you enough room to put an entire website's worth of information on the card, including background information on your company, product descriptions, a full explanation of services, and a strong sales pitch to boot.

How does it work? It's designed to fit right in the center section of a standard CD-ROM tray. Most cards are programmed to play automatically as soon as you load it into your CD-ROM drive. It's a fully contained, self-playing software package.

One of the strongest advantages of CD-ROM business cards is that it allows you to utilize full-motion video in a manner that is extremely convenient for your customers. While many companies expend huge sums of money placing streaming video on their Internet sites, the reality is that streaming video has been a rather frustrating experience for most people in today's 56K modem world. Video doesn't "stream" from websites. It dribbles.

Which is not to discount the power of the Internet. On the contrary, CD-ROM business cards have turned out to be one of the most powerful tools to drive traffic to websites. Digital business cards are almost always meant to connect your viewer to your website at some point in the presentation. Connecting to your website accomplishes several things: it allows you to track response; it captures data on your customer; it allows for two-way transactions, including online ordering; and it allows for access to time-sensitive information. If some of your facts and figures are subject to change on a weekly or monthly basis, don't put that information on your digital business card. Put it on your website and have you business card link to the appropriate page on your website to provide your customer with up-to-the-minute information.

This ability to connect to a website keeps your CD-ROM business card virtually "new" all the time. A company called iQrom has developed technology that allows your CD-ROM business card to update its contents by automatically connecting itself to a website and downloading new information to the host computer. Content is updated almost invisibly. The bottom line is that your sales presentation never goes out of date. Pricing charts, inventory spreadsheets, service rates and new product hunches will always be timely when using this updateable technology. Think of the fortune you'll save in printing alone.

The Los Angeles Times newspaper has replaced their printed media kit with a sleek CD-ROM business card. Ms. George Stewart, the L.A. Times Manager of Advertising Promotions, notes that, "Some media kits are two inches thick." Stewart campaigned within the L.A. Times to take their media kit digital and succeeded on the merit of several advantages: potential advertisers can now find the information they need by using a search function on the CD-ROM (as opposed to poring through page after page of information in a typical media kit); audio and video files provide a dramatic "feel" for the newspaper (key editors and writers at the L.A. Times are featured in video vignettes conveying their passion for what they do); and the digital media kit provides a certain entertainment factor that the print media kit lacked, making it more appealing overall.