Case Studies

The Ambassador Theatre Group (ATG)

About the Client

ATG are the global leader in live entertainment with close to 50 venues across Britain and the United States. They are internationally recognised as a leading producer of award-winning shows and are the market leader in theatre ticketing services.

Details of the Work

ATG operate 26 regional venues, each promoting shows and events for their theatre. In addition to the tri-annual season brochures, venues also send out a large number of targeted, show specific campaigns. These campaigns are extremely focused and typically much smaller in volume however due to the large number of venues within the group, in addition to seasonal peaks, there can be a large number of campaigns being sent out at any one time.

ATG venues had previously used multiple providers for this work, resulting in a wide range of price variation and inconsistency of both service and presentation of the mailer itself, meaning that many venues were paying extremely expensive rates for their campaigns, which had a direct impact on their ROI.

The Solution from CMS

Central Mailing Services were awarded the exclusive contract to look after not only the print, fulfilment and mailing of all ATG venue’s direct mail, but also the contracts for individual show mailings, membership card distribution and ticket mailings. CMS were able to demonstrate significant cost savings for the group and our extensive capacity for digital printing and high-speed enclosing ensured that even at peak seasonal times, all show mailings are dispatched to a strict SLA.

With a dedicated Account Management team looking after all the venues, each marketing manager’s specific requirements are processed quickly and efficiently.  The most cost-effective solution for the targeted Show mailings was found to be the use of digital print, as this allows for a huge amount of print personalisation, for both text and images as we can use XMPIE to create truly bespoke artwork that is able to be mail sorted in order to achieve the most cost-effective postage prices.

Central Mailing Services have invested heavily in their suite of Digital Xerox Commercial presses and finishing equipment, meaning we have the print capacity that ATG require, producing over 1m colour postcards in a 24-hour period. Using Central Mailing Services bespoke postage matrix and our buying power across multiple postal carriers, we have been able to provide a significant cost saving in both the print production and postage of all the venue’s targeted direct mail campaigns.

The Result

ATG have seen a vast improvement in timelines and dispatch speed thanks to CMS. The targeted digital print campaigns have been spread over a number of print formats, from A5 postcards to more complex creased, folded and tabbed naked mailers. These have been sent out on a wide variety of print substrates, allowing the venues the creative print freedom they require whilst also being fully personalised and produced and dispatched in an extremely short timeframe. The venues have also been able to benefit from our dedicated returns management service, which allows for up to date database maintenance and reduces both costs and environmental impact.

The competitive digital print prices and postage rates have provided ATG Group with significant cost savings, allowing the theatre’s marketing budgets to go further and promote more shows.