Multimedia Is the Message

Several small businesses are highlighted as readers see how to maximize the affects of marketing with multimedia.

Mixing graphics, text, audio, and video can make your pitch rise from a drone to a shout

Island Hideaways Inc. (annual sales of $1 million), a rental agent for villas and boats in the Caribbean, needed a way to grab consumers and travel agents by the throat. The company's colorful catalogs and brochures were getting lost in a sea of travel literature advertising hundreds of "paradise-spun" properties on dozens of "sun-kissed" islands. And even when they surfaced, vacation planners itching to trade in their business suits for Bermuda shorts had little patience for wading through pages of photos and type, no matter how sophisticated their design.

Paul Mermelstein, president of Island, which is based in Ellicott City, Md., knew that if he wanted to keep the company growing at its current annual rate of 40%, he'd have to find a tool that would make looking for the right vacation spot fun, a game. He needed an interactive tool that would give viewers the chance to profile their preferences -- location, budget, and room size, for instance -- and then sift through reams of information to make the perfect match.

He found the answer in a CD-ROM. Working with Straight Line Medium Inc., a multimedia production company in Manakin-Sabot, Va., Mermelstein was able to squeeze onto a single 51Ž4-inch silver disc almost 2,500 photographs, half an hour of music, 21 maps, enough text to fill a 200-page guidebook, and mini-spreadsheets with specific costs by season and number of guests for 390 villas, 23 resorts, 15 boats, and assorted cottages and condos. Now vacation planners can virtually dance their way through a customized tour. Called "Villas of the Caribbean," the disc not only brings in money (it sells for $29.95) but costs almost nothing to produce (Island grants a share of every sale to Straight Line). "It's an encyclopedia of information," says Mermelstein. "It's hundreds of searchable brochures on one CD."

Multimedia isn't just for the Internet. It's a self-styled tool that customers can pop into their PCs and business owners can set up right on the premises. There are four particularly effective ways for small companies to deliver multimedia: on a dedicated, single-company CD-ROM; on a multicompany CD-ROM catalog; on a floppy disk; and on a kiosk. Because a CD-ROM can hold so much information (a single disc holds as many as 650 million characters), presentations done in that format are usually splashier and more detailed than those on a floppy. Mixing art, text, audio, and video, multimedia presentations bring not just copy and art but customers themselves to life: with the click of a mouse, users can instantly jump to any part of the CD-ROM they want. Try that with a videocassette presentation.

It's that license to choose that makes the presentations so valuable to time-pressed consumers -- and such a great way for businesses to zing their message home. Good multimedia presentations have several layers of information. Users drill through them by pushing buttons located on menus of options. "Villas of the Caribbean," for instance, presents a map of the entire sea. Users take the first step "down" by clicking on a specific island. Subsequent steps entail clicking on a town, then on a particular resort in the town, then on a list of rooms in the resort, and finally on the resort's rates, services, and even cuisine. And if descriptions aren't enough to sway you, you can call up video clips showing frolicking vacationers having all kinds of fun in the sun.

San FranciscoÑbased Greet Street -- a three-year-old electronic retail distributor of greeting cards for suppliers such as the Sierra Club, Recycled Paper Greetings, and Graphiqe de France -- needed both the space and the selectivity provided by a CD-ROM but had nowhere near the $25,000-plus required for production. So it hooked up with 2Market Inc., a company in San Mateo, Calif., that puts together multicompany CD-ROM catalogs and on-line sites. For its catalog services, 2Market charges clients a production fee that runs from $5,000 to $7,000 and a percentage of gross sales brought in by the CD-ROM.

The cost to Greet Street -- less than $12,000 -- was well worth it. The CD-ROM catalog it's on boasts several well-known participants -- Starbucks Coffee, 1800-FLOWERS, and Godiva Chocolatier -- which gives the tiny, $500,000 company some welcome publicity. A few giants account for the vast majority of market share in the greeting-card industry; it's almost impossible for smaller "labels" like Recycled Paper Greetings to get retail shelf space. With the CD-ROM catalog, notes Greet Street's Tony Levitan, whose official title is cofounder and creator of chaos, the company doesn't need it. "We enlisted the technology to create a marketing revolution," he says.

If the company hasn't started a revolution, it's at least won half the marketing battle. To showcase its wares on the CD-ROM, Greet Street pulled vivid images from several of its lines and had professional actors read captions from humorous cards. One example: a holiday card featuring Mrs. Lennon trying to get a recalcitrant young John to eat his veggies. Accompanying the drawing is a male tenor's rendition of "Give peas a chance."

Average orders have been hefty, running $30 apiece -- a far cry from the typical $7 order from a paper catalog. "We're not just creating a channel of distribution," says Levitan. "We're bringing new buyers to the market."

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