Papirfly pronounced Paper Fly is an extremely successful Norwegian company that streamlines the design processes for companies. With Papirfly – an online solution – all employees can manage everything from flyers, brochures, catalogs, to online assets.

With companies such as DVS, El-kjøp, IBM, and more prominent international customers Papirfly for sure seems to have found a formula​ for success.

They wanted to create the brand. It was the first telecom concept in Norway that actually developed a brand and wanted to use it, of course. So what did they do? They produced a brand-book, sent it off to all of the shops, opened it, put it on the shelf.

Then I said, “Well, we are a tech business, so maybe we should do a CD-ROM or something.” Some of you remember. And they produced that. Same story, put it in the machine and looked through it and then put it a drawer. So it didn’t actually activate a brand, it just was something they was tried to do. Then they came to us and say, “There must be a better way. Why can’t we make a tool that makes it easier, faster, cheaper, and on brand.” And that’s how Papirfly was actually born. So that’s our business, was our business, and is our business today.

So this is what our clients can expect from Papirfly. When they buy our software, because we are a software business, we are not an agency, we don’t develop brand, we nurture it. We make it, as I say here, brand consistent. Businesses spend hundreds of thousands, even millions in developing a brand, and every business know that when they put a brand to life it starts diminishing. It’s not why people are actually bad or haven’t got the incompetence. Or maybe it is, the competence part. But it’s like they hand it over maybe to a local agency, and the agency they are creatives, so they don’t want to follow a kind of restricted brand, they want to make a twist of it and then the brand starts diminishing. We promise our clients brand consistency working with Papirfly.

Save money is the next one. You don’t have to work with specialists anymore. You can do it yourself. It takes, actually, we say it takes, to make it brief, it takes just as much time as to finish it with up Papirfly. So why bother make a brief when you have the tool to finish it up.

Save time is the third one. And that is important two ways, because most of us have a lot to do during the day, so we want to save time where we can. The other part of it is time to market. Working in a retail business, that’s really, really important, that you don’t have to, you know. We work with companies like Elkjøp, Elgiganten, Power and so on. When they make these [inaudible 00:03:16], it’s very important they can make it shorter to deadline. So with Papirfly, they can change very fast as up to deadline.

So, we have a mission. Why are we in this world? We are in the professional brand space. We make professional brand marketing. We are not into Office templates, PowerPoints or so forth. We are a competitor of specialists working in design, and we will make it brilliantly simple. That’s always what we are trying to do. In fact, we say that none of our clients need training to actually work the solution, but to be able to do it all, I will show you later. You can do it within in an hour, and then you’re be up and running and all of the system.

So, bring your brand to life in your day-to-day marketing. That’s the activation part, and we have a vision because we find this brilliant software, and we think we can actually strive for to make Papirfly [inaudible 00:04:45]. So Papirfly your brand, is gonna mean something. Even though only two of you knew us today, you will know us in the future.

So that was what we do. Who are our clients today? In Scandinavia, it’s much about retailers, real estate business, and some corporates. We have clients, like I said, Elgiganten, Power, is a competitor in Norway and Denmark in the same space. We have food chains as clients, Granngården is a client, Scandic Hotels, Choice Hotels. Many of the big brands in Scandinavia our client of us.

In the rest of the world, we work with these types of clients. It’s our main focus worldwide, is working with the top thousand global brands. That’s where we go into the market, where we do our marketing. So all these are clients of us, and what they are all about is the localization of campaigns and marketing. One example is Intercontinental Hotels Group. They have 13 brands in 50 languages. When they develop a recruitment campaign, early on they spent two weeks doing it. With Papirfly, they use one to two hours doing the same thing. So obviously it’s a huge benefit for them. One other example is Elkjøp, they do Elgiganten, they do this in four countries. This is Power, it’s a competitor, but it’s the same concept. They save like 10 to 12 man years doing it like this as they did before. That’s not my numbers, that’s their numbers.

Citibank. It’s a large American bank. One example from Warsaw, early on, when they were doing a recruitment campaign, they knew what to do, it took them three months to actually put it to life. And that’s because they have to involve legal, they have to involve marketing, they have to involve HR, to get it going. That’s why we go for these brands, these big brands that are global.

These are actually statistics from our clients. We ran this, and it’s hundred percent of the clients are satisfied with the purchase of Papirfly. A hundred percent say they resolved a lot of the day-to-day challenges. And then it’s 92% that are extremely or quite… Find it quite extremely or easy to create an asset, and 94% says it takes under 30 minutes to produce an asset in Papirfly. We have also a 95% retention rate. That means if you start using Papirfly, you don’t stop using it. It’s a new way of doing it, obviously.

One little example, and this not the robot thing, this is practical from a kick-off in this chain. They were asked, they got these as PDFs, and say, “Can you log in to Papirfly, make these. Find the products, find the right image. Do the price, before and after. Do this on the first one.” The winner spent one minute 58 seconds doing it. He has never seen Papirfly before, so that’s say something about how easy it is to actually do it using Papirfly.

We have a few clients that we are telling how they experienced Papirfly. This first one is IBM, the global IT giant. They’ve been around for a while. They asked, if you see this, this is how they see Papirfly. Is the sound on?

Life without Papirfly would be stressful. It would be slow, time-consu-

There’s no image. No video, just the sound. Whatever.

Life without Papirfly would be stressful. It would be slow, time-consuming and costly. Papirfly has enabled us to have a system in place now were we can create assets that we need very quickly. We can go to market much more quickly. We can react to our business and our clients much more quickly, and it also is extremely cost effective.

Does any of your specialists know why there was no video, just the sound here?

Finding partners that are similar to us is very difficult, but that wasn’t the case with Papirfly. Working with Papirfly actually enabled us to have the speed to market that we did not have prior. Papirfly has gotten us closer to our customers, in terms of, we now know our customers needs and wants better since we produce our offers and we produce our leaflets. I don’t consider Papirfly to be a heavy investment. I actually consider it to be a smart and future-oriented investment.

So this was two very different type of clients. One is a large retailer in Scandinavia, and the other one was IBM. Third one is a Danish logistic and transport giant. I think they’re like 50,000 people around the world and they also use Papirfly.

I’m the corporate brand manager of the DSV and we are using Papirfly. Papirfly is a fundamental part of our infrastructure, managing and delivering on-brand across and outside the entire organization. If you need to enable efficient brand-management, then Papirfly is the platform to go for. I think it’s pretty clear that it just becomes a better investment over time.

So three different kind of English. English Swedish, and Danish, and Norwegian. So different.

Scandinavian.

So that was what we do, and who our clients are, and a third to explain why clients use us, is why we actually do it. That’s really important for us. It says we’re not a DAM. Yes, we are a DAM too. But for us, it’s like DAM, how advanced can a digital archive even be? It’s not rocket science. It’s never going be. It’s going to bring the clients this much further to get a better business brand-wise.

We are working in a brand activation space, as I say, and we think that’s the future. That’s what we say in the beginning. That’s the future of brand activation. That’s Papirfly. So what used to take weeks now takes minutes to do in Papirfly. We have, of course, a lot of, we call it a suite of products. It’s a portal, it’s a brand portal and in that brand portal we have three different roles to fill.

One is to educate the people and the organization working with the brand. That is where you find a brand book available at all time. Updated, of course. You have a DAM. Of course you have a DAM, you need a DAM. You need somewhere to store images and logos and so forth. But where the magic starts is in the create part, and we are true believers of a one-stop shopping. That means you can create marketing material in Papirfly for print, HTML, email, web, social media and digital signage. If you know one product, you know them all.

At the center of the way we do it, is what we call the pixel perfect. We came from advertising agency, remember that, so it’s not some technology freaks that do something that looks like a brand. It’s a hundred percent replication of a brand when we make the tools. You can’t see whether it comes from a agency, a print shop or Papirfly actually.

Pixel perfect. That means, what we say a high precision, it’s a engine within the browser. So it’s independent of the browser’s text handling, and it’s offering sub-pixel control over typography. And that’s really, really important because a browser doesn’t represent 100% what’s going to come out for instance on a PDF print. Also, we are consistent of browser versions and browsers. That means the users of Papirfly can use any browser version, as long as it’s made after 2012 maybe, and when you get a new browser version, Papirfly stays just the same. There are many of our competitors out there, these two first ones, they don’t fill them. And then it’s… We mean they don’t have done enough work in making it pixel perfect.

Framework offers vector position measurements of both text and individual glyphs. So whether it comes, and let’s talk about print, whether it comes from InDesign or Papirfly, we can do the same. But so much more easier to use because we are not working with specialists, we are working with the end user.

[inaudible 00:17:21] open type features, and right to left. Of course we have the right to left when we work with Arabs or Asian countries, and we can mix them. So we can, that’s… It makes me dizzy, when I work with right to left and then put some left to right into it. We have multi-page text flows and text wrapping around arbitrary vector shapes. Of course we have to do that, it’s not all about squares. And it’s true WYSIWYG. That means you see exactly what’s going to come out on a PDF or a web banner. It’s not something you do on the side and see what happens with the PDF, forth and back. It works instantly, and the performance while typing is typically 60 frames per second. That means you eye won’t see any legacy when you work with it.

This last one is, for me obviously, PDFs are according to ISE profile. We optimize size and resolution and so forth. Working with Papirfly, if you do print kind of large print, three to five meters, or you do a smaller web banner, you use the same image, but of course it’s resized and re-sampled when you use it for the different purposes. Ease of use is mandatory in this world. They have to be able to use it fast, easy, across platforms. This one is just as important, we can do it all. It’s not that, if a user spends time using Papirfly and then see that have to leave to a specialist anyway, then they don’t bother using it a second time. So we have to do even complex material, and we have to work across social media, web banner, print and so forth. So that’s why we are saying Papirfly your brand. That’s all about getting your brand, activate your brand in a day-to-day business working with a brand. That’s us.

Thank you, I have a staring questions, maybe there are as well. I was just thinking, I discussed with you earlier, also you showed me this slide with some of your clients, international brands. But we spoke of this earlier today, also you said that you don’t have any, or not many at least, print houses as customers?

Yeah.

Has it not been a focus or have you been flying on the right. Any thoughts why, because when I listen to the presentations I think that this is relevant not only for the brand, no?

Yeah, it’s… In fact, I was told not to say that today, but I will anyway. We tried hard to sell to print shops, to sell to agencies. For me that was the route to market, obviously. We didn’t succeed, and I don’t know who’s fault it is. But anyway, we’re open to it. We want to work with industry. We think we have a great tool, but when something is great, it’s not for free. Maybe it’s bit costly, I don’t know. When we see at the print shops, they work with several clients, and there has to be someway around it. Because the clients love it, and that means for a print shop and a agency, that they will actually work, give something of value to the client. Short but long answer to the short question.

Have you seen a change of requirements and skills for in-house marketing departments, and also the need agencies, creative designers and so, working with this tool?

Yeah, what we see is creatives do what they are born to do, doing the creative part, because we don’t do that. We just replicate. This is a robot. Someone has thought of the ideas and the brand piece, and then we say, “Well, if you have developed your brand, and want to use it, then you’re better off using Papirfly because it’s faster, easier, cheaper.” Yeah, and we see some agencies that actually work with Papirfly for the production part because it’s faster. It’s value for the clients. Was that the answer?

Yes. But this would be, this would replace production.

Yeah, it will, and it should, because why not use a machine when it’s faster, easier, cheaper than people. Where we have problems selling Papirfly, is to Africa or to companies that have cheap labor. In Scandinavia, it’s very expensive.

Have you succeeded selling this to agencies?

Tried that. Yeah, yeah. The most conservative people in the world are agencies.

Because a lot of their money, they make on production. Making the same thing over and over again by default. And they’re charging a thousand euro per hour to their clients, or to your clients.

In my world, it shouldn’t do that because I’m selling Papirfly, but there are probably other tools out there that can do some of it. Not as good but close to as good and even that is better than doing manual work. That’s easier, faster, cheaper, easier. So, yeah, we tried and we managed some of it. But the creative part, developing a brand, the uniqueness, we cannot do that. That’s why the creative people were born. Other questions? It’s like 50… Two people knew of Papirfly, and now it’s like 80 perhaps. A lot of people.

How are you bringing artificial intelligence and automatization on the market?

We are not. Google and Facebook are. They do that a lot. So we will…

But you integrate

Yeah, we can integrate with them. So that’s…

Okay, well he’ll be with us at least for the break.

Yeah, Yeah, I will.

So it’s possible to…

Feel free to say you want to work with me and I’ll

Good. Thank you a lot.

Thank you.

‘How Papirfly is Automating Customer’s Marketing’ by Group CEO Per Oldeide.
Download the presentation here.

PRINTNEXT19: How is the Media Landscape Chang...

10 May 2019

PRINTNEXT19: Succeeding in the Communication ...

10 May 2019

PRINTNEXT19: Future Trends for Printing in th...

10 May 2019

PRINTNEXT19: So Much Is Your Company Worth + ...

10 May 2019

PRINTNEXT19: Where is the Profitability in th...

10 May 2019