The Advertising Specialty Institute® (ASI) today announced the availability of over 3,000 videos demonstrating and explaining key attributes of products from over 70 suppliers in ESP®, the number-one business technology platform in the promotional products industry.
With this latest ESP feature, suppliers can add product videos to their listings at no cost. To date, ESP features product videos from top suppliers like Hit Promotional Products (asi/61125), Gemline (asi/56070) and Logo Mats (asi/67849). Distributors can filter searches to deliver only results with videos highlighted by a special icon.
“Videos are cutting-edge marketing tools that really help distributors understand every feature of a product, how to explain it, position it and really sell it to end-users,” said Timothy M. Andrews, ASI president and chief executive officer. “For suppliers, there’s no better way to show off a product than by showing it in action, providing a premium competitive advantage.”
According to the Content Marketing Institute, 60% of both B2B and B2C marketers now use video for marketing. And although more and more suppliers would prefer using customized videos instead of photos to showcase products in ASI’s ESP, most lack the resources to create their own. Suppliers can now utilize the videoservices of ASI Creative Labs, a full-service in-house marketing agency that offers a slate of creative solutions to help suppliers and distributors better market their company, brand and products.
In addition to videos, ASI Creative Labs provides affordable, top-of-the-line creatives like print ads, print collateral, banner ads, custom websites and social media and content marketing campaigns to both suppliers and distributors.
As part of its continuing effort to offer the best shopping experience in the industry, ASI recently released another new feature that displays superior color search results in ESP and ESP Websites™. In order to identify a dominant color in search results, ASI color-tagged 2.5 million photos in ESP, allowing distributors to see products in the color they search for, saving time and frustration.
“These latest improvements make products easier to merchandise through presentations and on company websites, making ASI’s ESP more Amazon-like than ever,” said Andrews.
The ESP platform is modernizing the industry by directly connecting suppliers and distributors, simplifying the sales process and cutting time-consuming steps between searching and shipping. Further, ESP is the first business platform to display both current inventory and future availability, in real time. Buyers and prospects viewing distributor websites hosted on ESP can quickly and easily place an order, calculate the costs in real time and hit ‘send,’ allowing a distributor to review it in minutes and instantly transmit it to a supplier.
To date, 41 suppliers are providing data directly through ESP on 94,427 products, live inventory is visible on 182,840 products, with 22 suppliers offering electronic order submission and 46 suppliers connected via electronic order status, with more coming on board each week. MORE INFO