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The Wave2 Publishing Platform is a dynamic solution that lets non-technical users build customized content on demand using a Web browser. With Wave2, your staff or customers can easily and securely combine professional designs and variable content to create their own specialized documents online.
Design made simple
Wave2's Web browser interface puts non-technical users in command of state-of-the-art publishing technology:
A variety of applications
Advertisements, marketing collateral, catalogs, newsletters — Wave2 can produce any design-driven document in different formats, for different media. It's available in several standard configurations and backed by MEI's renowned service and support. Whether you promote your own products or service those who do, Wave2 offers mass-customization capability for your media production.
Flexible by design, Wave2 is particularly suited to creating customized marketing and sales material that is high in value and rich in design complexity. Examples include tailored product sell sheets, mini-catalogs, regionalized display ads and localized franchise sales materials.
Get something back
Wave2 lets you deploy a more relevant message and reap better customer response. With a distributed workflow, you can quickly and easily create documents tailored for specific regions, products and audiences. And by printing on demand instead of stockpiling pre-printed materials, you can save money that would be spent on storage and surplus.
Being able to update and output documents quickly, on demand, can improve the bottom line in a wide variety of industries. Marketing and sales divisions, ad agencies and newspapers can all benefit from a system that helps non-technical people court clients with targeted, up-to-date content in design-rich documents.
Corporate Marketers
Leverage digital assets and content to improve sales collateral and increase response rates
Corporate marketers need to take advantage of managed content and digital assets to tailor their messages to customers. And while serving content dynamically has become routine on the Web, doing so in print has proved challenging. As a result, most corporate product marketing materials are still built by hand. Pre-sales literature quickly becomes generic and out of date, pulling less effectively than targeted materials.
Wave2 lets you combine your managed assets with advances in digital color printing and state-of-the art Adobe page layout software to do in print what many companies already do on the Web: create customized documents on demand.
Marketers using Wave2 seize selling opportunities by creating limited-run collateral in minutes instead of days or weeks. The system combines a powerful rules engine with Adobe InDesign and InDesign Server to extract professional print results from your corporate content repository. With Wave2, your creative people can spend their time being creative, with their designs saved and repurposed repeatedly with content targeted to a specific audience. And the results are pre-approved to conform to corporate image and standards.
Wave2 quickly and cost-effectively creates targeted material that will boost your sales team's response and close rates, letting you concentrate on your core business.
Retailers and Cataloguers
Target micro-markets via dynamic customization
Brochures, flyers, in-store displays — indeed, all types of merchandising materials — have never been easier to assemble than with Wave2. Whether your catalog pages consist of a hundred unique products in a highly structured layout or just a few product shots wrapped in a stylized page design, Wave2 will automatically produce and deliver the end result to print or to the Web.
For companies that want to create a single normalized content store, Wave2 comes with its own XML database that offers configurable search tools. Alternatively, through Wave2's Java-based API, you can call the system directly from most corporate content management and asset management systems.
Using traditional methods, it would take weeks or months to update a catalog and get the new version shipped. In contrast, Wave2 lets corporate marketing control branding and design while delegating market-specific revisions to the field. Each region can quickly customize pricing and placement for local prospects and deliver final output to a local printer. Your field people get up-to-date customer materials, and you save money by reducing inventory, shipping and delivery costs.
Ad Agencies
Meeting agency challenges, deepening client relationships
Wave2 is an effective, cost-saving marketing tool, but it also provides ways for agencies to give true added value to their customers:
▪ Reduce clients' time to market for new ad campaigns.
▪ Make regionalized advertising more cost-effective for your clients.
▪ Deepen client relationships.
In our meetings with numerous agencies, MEI has found that, on average, the production of regionalized print versions of national ad campaigns (cell phone sales, for example) can take up to two full weeks. Being able to turn content around in two days would make for one happy customer!
In addition, by using Wave2, agencies can create unmatched service combinations. You take care of the creative work, while your customers can focus on their products, their content library and their linked asset management system. Then, from anywhere in the world, sales staff can access the Wave2 system to create on-demand, highly designed collateral and customer presentations.
Newspapers
Let advertisers build, customize and preview jobs over the Web
Are you a newspaper that wants to streamline the production and proofing cycle of automobile, real estate and other template-driven advertisements? Do you want to give advertisers an easy way to make last-minute changes? Would it help you or your customers to give them 24/7 control over text edits and photo updates?
Wave2 gives newspapers a fast and affordable way for advertisers to generate, edit and proof their own ads on the Web. In-house ad-builders and sales reps can get customer feedback quickly and efficiently, without cumbersome paper proofing. Deployed as an internal production tool, Wave2 can reduce costs and shorten the review-and-revise cycle, and it can be extended to manage and deploy materials for outside sales, corporate marketing staff and others.
Service Bureaus
Deepen client relationships by letting customers build, customize and preview jobs over the Web
Profitability in the digital printing business hinges on linking your automated print production to unique services that keep clients coming back. Wave2 provides the vehicle: jobs that clients can customize themselves, 24/7.
In contrast to many personalization products, Wave2 includes a powerful rules engine. On the fly, the rules engine “scores” content against appropriate templates. Variable content automatically flows into the layout that provides the best fit. If variable elements are over- or underset, the rules engine can make adjustments automatically, all within parameters controlled by your designers.
Here are a few of the many ways Wave2 opens opportunities for digital printers:
▪ National restaurants and retailers can create branded promotions for franchises to customize.
▪ Manufacturers can create branded sales collateral that can be regionalized by dealers and distributors.
▪ Cataloguers and distributors can use your service to quickly publish catalogs tailored to specific regions, markets, products or customer interests.
By reducing your clients' time to market and improving the relevancy of their materials, you tighten your relationships even as you increase the volume of jobs flowing to your press.
Components
Adobe InDesign Server
The full creative power of Adobe's professional layout application in a robust server configuration.
Rules engine
A Java server that works in tandem with InDesign Server. With the designer-friendly Configuration Tool, creative staff can apply layout, copy-fitting, image-placement, and typographic business rules to InDesign templates; create filters for profile-driven documents; and manage the routes and media channels for different types of documents.
Built-in Web deployment
Wave2 includes Apache Web server and two sets of application templates. For those who want to control the Web user experience, Wave2 plugs into any Web deployment architecture.
Built-in profiling engine
The supplied Profile Manager provides a highly configurable reader-profiling tool. Given a customer's profile, the engine automatically interrogates the rules engine to build a suitable content search. The search results are then fed to InDesign Server, using templates and user-defined business rules.
Built-in XML content store
An open-source XML index engine provides a fast and accurate method of searching content to extract the most relevant and appropriate items, according to business rules that you establish. Where the solution interfaces with an external digital asset management or content system, this XML index effectively searches the external database. A companion utility automatically filters and translates non-XML files to create XML suitable for automatically building documents.
Wave2 System Requirements
Wave2 is compatible with InDesign CS2 and CS3 on both Macintosh and Windows platforms.
Designers: InDesign with plug-ins for creating variable-content templates.
Server Platform Rules Engine: Macintosh or Windows 2000 or 2003 Server or XP Pro, running JBoss J2EE application server, Apache Web server and eXist XML database.
InDesign Server: Microsoft Windows 2000 or Windows 2003 Server, or Macintosh OS/X version 10.3.x or version 10.4.x.
Server Hardware: Pentium 4/800 MHz or above, with a minimum of 1GB RAM.
For more information about Wave2 and to arrange to see a demonstration, fill out the form below.