Manage your digital brochure and flyer production for online shoppers
Digital publishing or cross-media publishing in form of brochures has become increasingly important for consumers’ offer research and purchase. This demand became even stronger in recent years due to the strong increase in mobile device use and thus the constant availability of information. With more customers shopping online, turn your printed marketing production, brochure or circular, into an extended online shopping experience with automated product hotspots, QR codes, and augmented reality applications that recognise product images!
A dedicated palette in Adobe InDesign enables your design team to create, manage and modify hotspot overlay coordinates directly on the layout. Gallery assets (images, videos, logos) and text for each product offer get automatically exported along with the resulting JPEG/PDF and XML file, which contains information about the product link to the online shop (e.g.: overlay coordinates), as well as information about the project, its variants and product/offer details. The LAGO Digital Output module fully automates the creation of hotspot overlay coordinates and the assignment of gallery assets.
Digital Production Features
- Automatic and/or manual creation of hotspot overlay coordinates
- Automatic generation of XML and JPEG/PDF for the selected page based on workflow status with the following info:
- Project data fields/properties
- Project variant data fields/properties
- Document details and product/offer assignment
- Hotspot overlay coordinates with product/offer association
- Product/Offer information with attributes, prices, and asset assignments
- Automatic and manual assignment of gallery assets and component text associated with products/offers
- Configurable export definition (which data fields should be part of Digital Output’s XML
- Supports versioned and LAGO compressed pages
- Output store codes associated to project variants for downstream mapping
- Dedicated palette in InDesign for overlay, gallery asset, and main text management
What is LAGO?
LAGO automates and optimises multichannel marketing activities, significantly cutting production time and costs. LAGO has been a reliable multichannel marketing solution for over 25 years for Retail, Grocery, Agencies, and more.
At its core, LAGO is a PIM, DAM, and Marketing Production solution with an integrated checkpoint-based collaborative workflow, versioning optimisation, and proofing system.
LAGO’s Core digital tools make static pages come to life
- Digital Production: Manage and output content (including XML file) to publish online interactive digital circulars and digital catalogs.
- Direct Individualised Marketing: Link personalised product recommendations and custom landing pages directly from brochures and circular ads.
- Proofing & Approval: Web-based system, powered by Adobe InDesign Server, provides user-friendly commenting tools and intuitive task lists for an all-inclusive proofing process.
- Versioning: Eliminate manual intervention from designers with automatic versioning for national, regional, market or customers specific variants.
On the FLIPP Side of Digital Publishing
Another significant benefit of LAGO – besides the efficient production of printed circulars – is that digital platforms like FLIPP use this data to populate the weekly ad content to digital shopping marketplaces and retailer mobile apps for iOS and Android. These retailer apps, designed to recognise the user’s location and nearest store, automatically feature the most relevant circular of all the regional and market-specific digital versions created each week. For example, one retailer showcases dynamic weekly offer content from up to 350 different variations as a digital-first, mobile optimised experience.
Every page of the circular can become interactive. Customers can zoom in and click on any of the advanced products inside the weekly circular ad to visit a secure e-commerce page for ordering that item. In addition, the page indicates how many of those items are currently available in the user’s local store, home delivery options, customer ratings, and even the item’s location inside the store. LAGO powers this digital output as a critical component of the FLIPP platform. Comosoft has been a collaborative partner with FLIPP since 2016.
Use data & design for your customers´ personal experience
The add-on module DIM (Direct Individual Marketing) from LAGO lets you sharpen the focus of your targeted marketing activities for your customers. LAGO DIM provides you with a “One-to-One” output option for both digital environments as well as print channels. Reap the benefits of personalised and custom advertising to offer your customer base relevant products and to attract attention to your offerings.
- Cross-channel referrals from the print page to digital channels based on image recognition or QR codes
- Template editor for HTML content
- Generation of personalised and custom emails and landing pages based on product data from LAGO PIM
By permanently referencing products on print pages with LAGO PIM, you can automatically create links from printed pages to digital channels. Whether you fall back on QR codes or image recognition via smartphones or tablet apps is up to you. In both cases, LAGO DIM lets you code a customer URL for each customer or customer group to link to personalised and custom landing pages.
With LAGO DIM you can also directly add products from LAGO PIM for personalised and custom emails and landing pages. LAGO DIM will handle the processing of address data, template generation, and the production of emails and landing pages. Then, an email service provider of your choice can handle dispatching emails and hosting landing pages.
To better track from where a user was directed to your website, you have the option of using a different landing page for emails than for print pages.
Producing an ePaper is fast and easy: Drag & Drop the completed PDF into a hot folder, select the processing profile and generate your final ePaper. There‘s no easier way to create an ePaper unless you use our upstream PIM system.
LAGO ePaper
The LAGO ePaper is our solution for managing and generating online brochures. Existing PDF brochures can be made accessible in the cloud and integrated. Our wizard lets you automatically link articles in your webshop. This gives you the option of sharing brochures for specific target groups as needed with the customer. Existing brochures and flyers produced with LAGO can also be imported into the online catalog with a direct article link – without additional effort. This means you benefit twice from the work you only have to put in once.
- Responsive design with look-and-feel of print publications
- Webshop product previews and direct linking to products
- Shorten time-to-market for publications
A wizard guides you reliably and efficiently as you import your online brochure details. Use it to define hyperlinks and their structure, generate cross references and pre-define web previews for views of article details. You can save the settings for future use.
Hot folders can also be defined using the generation profiles saved in the wizard so your advantage is you only make your settings once. This means you can generate online brochures directly in future and publish them on the website without having to actually do anything. This saves time, improves the reliability of the process and ensures that you always provide the customer with the most current information. Simply place the PDF you generate into one of the folders you‘ve defined and LAGO does the rest.
Proofing workflows
Browser Based Proofing
As InDesign documents save in LAGO, a proof of the page is automatically generated for all users to mark up and review in our new browser-based HTML5 LAGO Proof solution. Proofs are accessible through the LAGO jobs list or standard document list. They are a part of the integrated LAGO workflow with permission-based control for accessibility and task allocation. In addition, when proofs open in the proofing area, a set of easy-to-use commentary tools are made available for each user to mark up changes directly to the proof.
When corrections are marked-up and saved on a LAGO proof, the corrections are automatically linked in position and made visible to the layout page in InDesign page. This allows the layout artist and copywriters access to the corrections made during a round of proofing without having to leave their layout application. Additionally, there are a set of correction tools available in InDesign giving the layout artist and copywriters the ability to create corrections and manage corrections within the layout application. When corrections are set to done or edited, these changes are automatically made visible in the browser based LAGO Proof solution, thus allowing for complete bi-directional communication for efficient collaboration and transparent communication.
When certified documents or snapshots of the page are generated via the workflow they become accessible in LAGO Proof for historical comparison when viewing a proof. This allows users the ability to compare corrections based on how that page looked like prior to changes being made, making it much easier to verify whether something was done correctly and for overall visual comparison.
When a correction is created using LAGO Proof commentary tools, LAGO automatically timestamps the corrections with the username of the owner of the correction, the date/time of when the correction was made, and the document status step of the document at the time of when the correction was made. Additionally, when the correction is modified or set to done, username and date/time information are also tracked giving all users complete transparency as to who created, who last modified, and who resolved the correction.
To make it easier to filter through a list of corrections, LAGO offers the ability to filter corrections based on corrections you have created, corrections that are processed and unprocessed, corrections created by all users, corrections created on a specified document status, and corrections created by a specific primary working group. It is also possible to filter corrections based on a combination of the filtering examples, listed above. Filtered correction results can be downloaded to XLSX format for external usage and archiving.
Workflow Management
LAGO’s Workflow Management enables your marketing production process to run efficiently and smoothly, even with large data sets and complex versioning. Our workflow module offers automated task management combined with highly configurable user & group rights.
The easy creation and configuration of parallel workflows for different channels (print or digital) provide the means to produce marketing materials while respecting each channel’s nuances.
LAGO’s Workflow Engine automatically assigns jobs to teams (or individuals) and monitors their progress through completion. Reporting tools let you keep an eye on production and immediately identify possible bottlenecks. Because of its modular nature, LAGO can produce multichannel marketing materials from planning to output.
Production Features & Benefits
- Corrections list downloadable to XLSX format for archiving and external usage
- Filter corrections based on document status, primary working group, processed or not processed
- Zoom in/out capabilities
- Corrections timestamp with username, date/time, and document status from when the correction was made
- Auto-message prompt for notifying users that an InDesign document has unfinished corrections
- Correction list and correction tools available in InDesign page
- Browser based solution & HTML5 framework
- Support multi-proof selection for proofing more than 1 page
- Easy to use commentary tools
- Integration into the workflow with task lists for selection and management of tasks
- Dedicated “Correction Supervisor” permission
- Access to certified documents for history comparison of proofs
- Print out correction document and corrections list
- Bi-directional communication with InDesign page
FAQ
Cross-media publishing refers to the publishing of content in several media based on media-neutral data that is based on a single data source across all media. With increasing use of the Internet, the importance of digital publishing or cross-media publishing grew because website texts, online brochures and print media could be created automatically using a single source of data. This significantly streamlined the publishing process, reduced the frequency of errors and redundancy in data management.
Learn more about digital publishing in our blog
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