If you want this year’s business Christmas card to be a real winner, then you could do a lot worse than consider a product you really can’t forget. It is known in the carton engineering industry by different names, including blink card, blink card, and waterfall card. While not a Christmas card in the traditional sense, it has been used with great success as a vehicle for conveying Christmas greetings from business to business.
This is a truly tactile interactive marketing product that is virtually impossible to ignore. Unfortunately, a written description of this product fails to describe what it is and it is much better to try and get a sample, although there are several videos online on Metacafe and You Tube of different examples of this type of product, each of which give a good demonstration of the excellent movement. It is a testament to the unique appeal of the product that in its first 4 weeks on the site, a 19 second Metacafe video had been viewed nearly 60,000 times!
So what is a flash card or cascade card? Well, it is a product that owes a lot to the cardboard engineering techniques used in its design. It can be made in different sizes, but in most cases it is a “DL” size book containing 5 cards that move when you pull a tab. Sounds simple right, but once you get one, you will be mesmerized. Remember those little books where you would quickly hover over the bottom right corner and a cartoon would start moving? Well, it’s something like that for promotional marketing use only! It is printed in full color on a large card and is used primarily in B2B direct marketing campaigns.
A great promotional marketing product, the blink card or waterfall card is like a book on anti-gravity – you can’t put it down! (Sorry) Many advertising ideas have been used in the product, the most creative of which take full advantage of the product’s ability to suggest movement. In fact, clever graphics combined with the unique movement of the product is ultimately the key to the product’s appeal. Marketing ideas have been used to show moving cars, taxis, running people, running animals, blooming flowers, swimming ducks, rolling balls and many more examples of the clever use of cardboard engineering to emphasize the advertiser’s message.
If you are thinking of a Christmas theme to use the product quality move, then an obvious suggestion would be to portray Santa’s sleigh flying through the Christmas night sky. Another seasonal idea could be to show someone throwing a snowball or perhaps a snowball that gets bigger as it rolls down a snow covered hillside.
These products are always custom printed so you stay in control of the creative process, which means you’re potentially in charge of a holiday masterpiece! Whatever theme you ultimately decide on can only be enhanced by the quirky appeal of the product and your business Christmas card is sure to attract more attention than all those cards your competitors will send to your customer.