Communication Arts Featured Software
October 2002

Oncall Interactive’s PDF Generator software for Harley-Davidson was featured in the October 2002 edition of Communication Arts Magazine. Story listed below.

Communication Arts Interactive Annual 8
Advertising Design Category
Harley-Davidson Dealer Ad Planner
Page 100

Overview:
Sent to Harley-Davidson dealers, the 2002 Ad Planner provides information and tools to help dealers create advertising materials for individual markets, which also comply with corporate brand standards. An Ad Builder feature enables the creation of printer-ready materials that can be previewed in PDF format and downloaded or e-mailed without leaving the application. Also included on the CD are pre-produced radio spots, additional images for use in other dealership materials and information on marketing, public relations and cooperative advertising guidelines. The combination of tools on this CD makes it innovative, and the understandable interface makes it invaluable.

Creator’s Comments:
This tool was designed to provide Harley-Davidson dealers with a comprehensive, easy-to-use advertising and promotions resource to help them develop customized marketing materials.

Previous planners, with Quark files of customizable ad layouts, were unsuccessful. Because 85% of Harley-Davidson dealers were creating their advertising in-house and only 10% of them owned page layout and/or graphics software, the earlier planners didn’t fulfill their needs. Even worse, the remaining 15% of Harley-Davidson dealers were contracting agencies to help them develop higher-quality, localized ad campaigns. The campaigns were often a departure from the corporate-approved design standards.

Given the drastically varying technical capabilities of dealerships, the challenge was to create a simple, easy-to-use application that would run on older computers without any page layout software, that was also advanced enough to entice more sophisticated dealerships to use the brand-approved templates. A tight production timeframe made creating a Web-version in time for the spring riding season—when dealership advertising is at its highest—impossible. A CD-Rom format was developed instead.

After reviewing a number of corporate samples, we were surprised to discover that customization features were only viewable onscreen and not actually built-into the PDF files. This meant that after a dealer had created and customized an ad template, the customized language still needed to be sent separately to the print vendor via e-mail. The vendor then needed to insert the customized language into the PDF and send an approval proof back to the dealership. To eliminate these time-consuming steps, we decided to provide Harley-Davidson dealers with the functionality of e-mailing final artwork directly off the CD.

Oncall Interactive in Chicago created the programming code for a new application that could customize PDF files during the ad-building process. They also built an e-mail function so that ad materials and image files could be sent without having to exit the CD, download the files and create an e-mail attachment. Dealers can download and e-mail final artwork directly from the application. In addition, PDFs were created as compressed files that automatically expanded when opened, so that hundreds of ads could be stored on a single CD.

By providing two different styles of ad layout (Nostalgic and Contemporary), hundreds of copy/image combinations and the ability to create and insert four lines of customizable text, Harley-Davidson dealers were more apt to use the corporate-approved templates. And dealers who didn’t have the access or funds for ad agency or design assistance, now have a free, easy-to-use tool to create their own advertising materials.

>> Back to Press Releases