Before the pandemic, retail giant Macy’s wanted a fun way to spread the joy of its signature live event, the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, with people watching it at home on TV. It was an ideal project for the team at Vanguard Direct. 

Vanguard, based in New York City, has a 40-year heritage in the print industry but now goes to market as a full-service technology and marketing solutions firm. Digital and offset printing are still important to Vanguard’s offerings, but today the company is laser-focused on finding ways to combine data and technology to help clients reach their goals.

Personalized digital print is often a result of that combination, but so too are recent projects like an interactive puzzle map that helped a hospital system rebrand, an interactive engagement campaign to encourage New York City kids to read year-round, and art/design production and custom packaging for a rustic wooden gift box.

Mobile App Lets TV Viewers Engage With Macy’s

That high level of creativity and innovation impressed Macy’s leaders, who hoped Vanguard could handle fast design and development of a mobile iPhone app once it was approved by the company’s marketing team and parade planners.

Vanguard accepted the challenge and immediately suggested a creative concept to build an interactive feature within the app that would be powered by augmented reality technology. It would enable home viewers and spectators to “balloon themselves” into an elf character in the parade, and then share the experience with friends. After downloading the app, people could take photos of themselves (or shots of their families or pets, etc.), and the feature would automatically create an image of that picture floating as a balloon. Vanguard Direct’s team explained that when users would point the phone to the TV screen, it would seem like the viewer was part of the actual event.

Macy’s was excited about the idea, says Preeti Sharma, Vanguard Direct’s Chief Digital Officer and self-described “nerd-in-chief.” The Carnegie Mellon University grad is responsible for evaluating, recommending and implementing new products and technologies for Vanguard’s customers, and is a great example of the rise of data experts in the print industry.

The company began working on the app development, and in just a few weeks the Elf-O-Matic iPhone app was born. In the three weeks leading up to Thanksgiving Day, the app reached No. 2 on the iPhone App Store and was downloaded more than 250,000 times. On Thanksgiving morning, Vanguard Direct’s creation was featured on the FOX TV program “Fox & Friends,” and the show’s viewers were invited to send images to the hosts. Several Elf-O-Matic “floats” were displayed during the TV broadcast.

A Team Dedicated to Helping Brand 

For the past 40 years, Vanguard has kept something simple in mind — customers come first, and longstanding trust must begin with understanding their specific goals and challenges.

In 2022, that hasn’t changed. What has changed are the number of options those organizations have to communicate, and the number of headaches they get when their brand communication is ineffective, drab or inconsistent. 

Over the past several years, the Vanguard team has worked hard to transition the company into a true solution provider in the area of digital communications. While the company has also experienced a resurgence in print activities, much of its time, money and energy have been spent on improving skills in digital areas such as mobile apps, web development, content management and social media.

The strategic move is paying off, as marketing managers in all industries are looking to integrate their communication in a forward-thinking, cohesive way that leads to improved connections (engagement with customers) and conversions (more business from those clients). They often struggle to pull it all together — to manage their brand across multiple substrates and screens, to capture and make sense of analytics and to impact the bottom line by increasing sales rather than just curbing expenses.

That’s why Vanguard’s approach and technology capabilities resonate with today’s marketplace, says President Bob O’Connell. The same company firms have trusted for years to handle their printing and warehousing now can turn to Vanguard for customized tablet applications, website development and other high-tech marketing solutions.

“Moving from traditional execution up to the strategic space has been a transformative shift in what defines us."

--Bob O'Connell, President, Vanguard Direct

In-House Digital Agency Blends Tech & Talent

“After years of searching to understand where we might fit in to this emerging business space,” Bob says, the company built an in-house digital agency called VGD. “Rather than simply building websites or performing other technology-based development work, we are now able to offer our clients a rich selection of campaign-based programs, custom-built and tailored to the client’s needs and budget.”

VGD’s capabilities include digital advertising, social media, mobile and tablet apps, responsive websites, user/interaction design, custom and web applications, and more.

“They are typically integrated with print,” Bob says. A typical campaign might start with both emails and direct mail, inviting the audience to participate in a social campaign. That social campaign might run on Facebook or Instagram for several weeks, creating interest in the client’s products or services, and drive them to a landing page that captures valuable data. That landing page could direct the audience to the client’s website for more information. “Whether the client is trying to drive awareness or a purchase, we are capturing all of the audience’s digital activities and reporting them to the client on a weekly or even daily basis,” Bob says.

The execution of this type of campaign work has many deliverables but also requires the foundation of a sound and integrated methodology, Bob says. At the heart of VGD’s methodology is the idea that clients can improve their business and marketing processes via data transformation and process automation, and can harness the power of content in a coordinated way to drive growth.

“Moving from traditional execution up to the strategic space has been a transformative shift in what defines us,” Bob says. “And while the technologies we use are important, it’s the ideas we have that distinguish us from our competition. Technologies and platforms continue to come and go, but it’s how we leverage them for our clients that creates and adds value.”

Helping Clients Get More Tactical, Targeted & Digital 

Today, Vanguard’s salespeople often begin meetings with prospects (and land those meetings in the first place) because of its marketing technology capabilities. “That elevator speech isn’t easy — sometimes it seems to take us about 50 floors to get there — but we believe our role in this industry is to help customers navigate the digital revolution we’re all in,” Bob says. “We still love print, and we still sell print, but we’re really leading with digital solutions today."

That kind of prospecting requires a different kind of person than the type that often succeeds with conventional print providers. “In the traditional print industry, that successful salesperson might be someone who is immediate-gratification-based, shrewd, hustling, one step ahead of the next guy and price-competitive,” Bob says. “That type of person is actually a turn off for us and our clients. We don’t go into meetings saying, ‘We can do A to Z!’ We go in to listen, identify the problem, begin to create a relationship and then bring in the appropriate people to handle the account collaboratively. It takes a different mindset to offer digital technology solutions.”

To that end, Vanguard’s leadership team includes Preeti Sharma, the Chief Digital Officer who led the Macy’s app project, and Thomas Veneroso, VP of Information Technology who oversees Vanguard’s architecture and plays a major role in the company’s tech strategy. The company’s technology services team is filled with print technophiles, multiple graduates of the Rochester Institute of Technology, creatives, and subject-matter experts in coding and application development.

“In a lot of cases, we introduce clients to new ideas and new concepts, and they quickly come on board,” Preeti says. “For other clients who might be more reluctant at first, we’re happy to handle their print needs and maybe start to introduce things like email marketing.”

For example, when New York City’s HR team needed a better way to administer the renewal of Medicaid services for 2.7 million New York City residents, “they were buried in manila folders, paper and data entry,” says Preeti. Vanguard created a document management solution that allows data to be processed digitally rather than by traditional manual methods. It created a dynamic, variable-mail piece in seven languages. Each day, Vanguard prints and mails documents to Medicaid participants, reaching a total of 100,000 city households monthly.

Vanguard also created a program to process returned applications — setting up case files, scanning and indexing applications and supporting documents. These files are transmitted each day to the HR team for automatic uploading into its case management system.

In its first year, the new approach led to much higher renewal rates, according to Vanguard. Cycle time has been cut from one week to two days, and thousands of dollars have been saved in printed materials and postage. Data collected in the new process also helps New York City to meet state reporting requirements for Medicaid activity.

“The opportunity to help clients collect, manage and use data has led to a crossroads in our industry,” Bob says. “We can either view digital technologies as competition, or we can be a true resource to our clients by providing the appropriate solution to a communication challenge. The value of our industry is the ability to provide a business solution that helps the client’s bottom line, whether the execution includes print or not.”