Shape up your marketing.

• Author: MARKS, SUSAN J.
• Position: Brief Article

CD-ROMS NOT JUST ROUND ANYMORE

ROUND IS NOT NECESSARILY THE SHAPE of CD-ROMs anymore. Evolving from a fad item just a few years ago, shaped or custom-cut CDs are making a marketing splash today in boardrooms and offices, at trade shows and career fairs worldwide.

Even U.S. military recruiters are in on the trend, handing out mini disks as an alternative to ordinary pamphlets or just to drive traffic to their Web sites.

Disks come nowadays in dozens of shapes and sizes: simple credit cards or business cards, arrows or stars, even Christmas wreaths, automobiles or images of Elvis.

They fit in most CD-ROM drives (although they won't work in car stereos or automatic-feed drives); they contain up to 50 MB or so of information (a full size CD holds more than 650MB); and usually have appropriate Internet links to a company's Web site.

And they work.

Steve Scalet, Littleton-based account manager for Duplium Corp., a Toronto-based CD manufacturer, said the shaped disks have developed into a cost-effective medium for getting a company's message across.

Marketing departments are beginning to count on them as promotional giveaways, to include in media kits and other company literature, or as a memorable way to reinforce product information for a specialized sales force.

Unlike traditional vinyl records, CDs are read from the inside out. As long as the cut lines of the disk are not infringing on the data lines then it's possible to print or imbed data all the way to the edge of the cut. That's enough space to hold a five minute video or dozens of pages of text.

The most popular shape is like a credit-card or business card, says Scalet. Duplium, like many manufacturers, has ready-to-go templates for that shape, or it can custom-cut other shapes. The latter process, however, is more expensive.

One Colorado company that partners with Duplium and is sold on the marketability of credit-card...