If you want this year’s company Christmas card to be a real winner then you could do a lot worse than consider a product that you really can’t forget. It is known in the cardboard engineering industry by different names including flicker card, flick card and waterfall card. While it’s not a Christmas card in the traditional sense, it has been used with great success as a vehicle to convey Business to Business Christmas greetings.
This is a really tactile interactive marketing product that is virtually impossible to ignore. Unfortunately a written description of this product fails to portray what it’s about and you are much better off trying to get hold of a sample although there are several online video clips on Metacafe and You Tube of different examples of this type of product each of which which give quite a good demonstration of the excellent movement. It’s a testament to the unique appeal of the product that in its first 4 weeks on the site, one 19-second Metacafe video had been viewed almost 60,000 times!
So, what is a flicker card or waterfall card? Well, it is a product that owes a lot to the cardboard engineering techniques that are used in its design. It can be made in different sizes but in most instances it is a “DL” sized book that contains 5 cards which flick over when you pull a tab. Sounds simple doesn’t it but once you get hold of one you will be mesmerised. Remember those little books where you quickly flicked the bottom right hand corner and a cartoon started to move? Well it’s sort of like that only for promotional marketing use! It is printed in full colour on a substantial card and it is mainly used in B2B direct marketing campaigns.
A terrific promotional marketing product, the flicker card or waterfall card is like a book on anti-gravity – you can’t put it down! (Sorry) Lots of advertising ideas have been used on the product, the most creative of which take full advantage of the product’s ability to suggest movement. In fact, clever graphics married to the product’s unique movement ultimately hold the key to the appeal of the product. Marketing ideas have been used to show cars moving, taxis, people running, animals running, flowers opening, ducks swimming, balls rolling and loads more examples of clever use of the cardboard engineering to put emphasis on the advertiser’s message.
If you are thinking of a Christmas theme to utilise the product’s quality movement then one obvious suggestion would be to portray Santa’s sleigh flying through the Christmas night sky. Another seasonal idea might be to show someone throwing a snowball or perhaps a snowball getting bigger as it rolls down a snow covered hillside.
These products are always custom printed so you maintain control of the creative process meaning that you are potentially in charge of a Christmas masterpiece! Whatever theme you finally decide upon can only be enhanced by the quirky appeal of the product and your company Christmas card is certain to gain more attention than all those pieces of card that your competitors will send to your customer.