Podcast

Oct 13, 2026

The Tangible Brand with Betsy Davis

IN CLEAR FOCUS: Our guest is Betsy Davis of Sandy Alexander, who explores the lasting power of phygital media and physical brand experiences. Discover how combining targeted direct mail with digital channels significantly boosts consumer response rates. Betsy also shares how to leverage spending data for personalization without crossing into the "creep factor". Learn how embedding conversational AI agents into printed mail via QR codes offers deep insights and accelerates marketing workflows.

Episode Transcript

Adrian Tennant: Coming up in this episode of IN CLEAR FOCUS.

Betsy Davis: When you get a mail piece, the physical time spent with that piece is much longer than somebody swiping and deleting a digital communication, that often get lost, don't get opened at all, get put in a spam folder. There's no spam folder at the mailbox.

Adrian Tennant: You're listening to IN CLEAR FOCUS, fresh perspectives on marketing and advertising, produced weekly by Bigeye, a strategy-led, full-service creative agency growing brands for clients globally. Hello, I'm your host, Adrian Tennant, Bigeye's Chief Strategy Officer. Thank you for joining us. Most marketing budgets have favored screens for two decades. Yet the piece of mail a customer holds, the printed catalogue, the pop-up they can walk into, all still shape how people feel about a brand in ways digital impressions rarely match. The question for marketers is when physical media earns its place in the plan and how data now makes that spending measurable. My guest today works both sides of that question. Betsy Davis leads sales and marketing at Sandy Alexander, a brand experience and commercial printing company founded in 1963 and based in Clifton, New Jersey. The Marth Group acquired Sandy Alexander earlier this year and also owns Endpoint in Minneapolis and Digital Lizard with facilities in Idaho and New Jersey. Betsy came up through the industry from the production floor, rising to senior sales leadership across three companies over 25 years. Today, she sits on the board of the PRINTING United Alliance and went to Capitol Hill this year to represent the industry. She also co-hosts Sandy Alexander's podcast, Color Bar. To discuss physical media, data, personalization, and where artificial intelligence fits in, I'm delighted that Betsy is joining us today from just outside Tulsa, Oklahoma. Betsy, welcome to IN CLEAR FOCUS.

Betsy Davis: I'm so excited to be here. I think we're going to have a fun chat today.

Adrian Tennant: Me too. Betsy, you started in the industry through a leadership development program, taking the one-year track so you could move straight into sales rather than the full three-year route that most graduates took. What did learning the production side first teach you about marketing that you think you might have missed coming in from the brand side?

Betsy Davis: That's a great question. You know, what's interesting is that for every company that I've ever worked with on the print side, I've had the fortunate opportunity to touch a lot of different industries and verticals. And so I think being able to see how different brands approach print based on their audience based on what they were communicating and seeing those different iterations of how brands were trying to communicate through print was a really interesting thing for me to see. It also taught me the importance of color as it relates to brands. And I think about when I first started, I worked in San Antonio, Texas, and USAA was a big client of ours. And so the USAA blue emblem and the green, we were always on press and trying to make sure that we met that. And so just to understand from a marketer's perspective, the importance of their brand, their color, And even to the executive level, how important that was, that was some of the interesting things that immediately come to mind is how, depending on your audience, how you approach it, and then just the pride that people took and the brands that we were supporting.

Adrian Tennant: Sandy Alexander describes itself as a ‘brand experience company’ rather than as a printer. What changed about what the company does for its clients to position yourselves that way?

Betsy Davis: Yeah, we rebranded the company after COVID. And part of what drove it was when our clients started seeing that when we were able to get back out in the wild, as I call it, that consumers were finally coming back in store. They were out and about in the environment again, and so we were seeing customers touch their consumers in literally every channel. So it was now a lot of out-of-home, billboards, and transit wraps. And it was in events and arenas and pop-up shops. It was in-store, again, a big focus on the in-store experience. And then obviously, direct mail is a huge part of what we do, so that experience in the mailbox. And so we recognize that for us to support our customers in the right way, we had to be able to show up for them in all the places they were showing up in front of their consumers. And so that meant that we had to really become a company that could support them in all those different channels. And whether that was 2D or 3D, we were responsible for helping them create this experience that was consistent regardless of where it was touching their consumer.

Adrian Tennant: Well, Sandy Alexander was acquired recently by the Marth Group. Betsy, for a marketer watching this part of the industry consolidate, what does joining a group alongside Endpoint and Digital Lizard change about what Sandy Alexander can do for its clients?

Betsy Davis: Yeah, so it was exciting. The Marth Group acquired us now. It's almost been 90 days, which is crazy that it's happened so fast. But for me, coming from the sales and marketing side, it's been really nice to have something fresh to talk about with our clients. Some of those things are expanding our footprint and being able to now even expand the national footprint that we had, and adding Minnesota to that- so now being able to offer midwest distribution points is killer for our customers that were doing big retail and big direct mail. For you know digital lizard offers a completely different type of offering. They focus on small business, they focus on those print-on-demand consumer goods, products gifting. So you think of Shutterfly or Minted or Moonpig - those types. Digital Lizard does a lot of that type of business and so it touches still print obviously, but in a different round of what we're used to thinking about. So that's fun to be able to. Approach customers with a different offering. And we're woman owned, so a little girl power moment going on. So I've never been able in all my years of being in this industry, have ever been able to have that kind of tier one minority diversity opportunity to share with our procurement people that we work with. And when you go through the RFPs and the audits, people always want you to be able to check that box and have never been able to until now. So we're officially able to announce that to the world. So there's a few really key differentiators that we're really excited to bring to the table with the Marth Group.

Adrian Tennant: Excellent. Well, after 25 years in this business, you've watched budget shift heavily toward digital. What can print and direct mail do for a brand that digital channels on their own can't do?

Betsy Davis: Actually be touched by the consumer. There's just something about that tangible moment. You know, we talk a lot about the moment whenever you go to your mailbox and you have a catalog from one of your favorite brands that you shop from all the time. You want to sit down and flip through the pages and take it in and just have a moment with your screen not in front of you. I think about the seven-year-old that we have running around here, and she's the one that wants to run out to the mailbox and come back in and flip through it all. So there's just something from that tangible touch, feel, smell, perspective that I think just gives us something that we miss when we're always in front of our screens. It's nice to sit down with something and actually be able to touch it.

Adrian Tennant: Well, yeah, as you mentioned, there is a physical response to opening a piece of mail that's different from the one that you get when scrolling through social media. Yeah, for sure. Betsy, in the campaigns you see working, what difference does that make for the brands running them?

Betsy Davis: Well, I would say this, when you combine the two, you're even more powerful. So the two standing alone do their jobs, but what we found is that when our customers combine the two and have them work in tandem and have that synergy between the two, we see response rates go up significantly. So what we're seeing customers do is they're using their CRM for all of their digital communications- and it's triggered based on an abandoned car, based on somebody visiting for the first time- based on a recent purchase. And so they're triggering those communications. What customers I think are missing is that we can also trigger direct mail. To fall right in line with those same communications. And you can have that same content, the same imagery, that same personalization happening with print as well. So we actually will send a customer's direct mail piece. We can let our end customer know when that mail piece has hit the consumer's mailbox. That then allows them to trigger the email a couple of days later with the same message, with the same offer. So now they're seeing it in their hand and they're seeing it in their mailbox and then they're seeing it hit their inbox, the response rates go up. And so it's just that extra touch and hitting people where they are, whether they're sitting at home on their couch or whether they're sitting in their car or on their phone. So yeah, so that's what we really see happen is whenever you find the synergies between the two. Really be smart about the timing between the two, it can impact response significantly.

Adrian Tennant: There's something about a trust factor when you've been touched by both.

Betsy Davis: Yes. Yep. You really do know who I am.

Adrian Tennant: For a CPG or retail marketer, print and email entail real costs in lead time and production, of course. When a client is weighing that against a digital buy that they can launch almost immediately, how do you help them think about that trade-off?

Betsy Davis: Well, immediately, what I think is they can trigger it immediately. They can execute a campaign immediately and make that instantly happen, that instant gratification. But in the digital world, people can also instantly bypass it. They can also instantly delete it. They can also instantly unsubscribe. When you get a mail piece, you've got an interaction. Even if it's picking it up to throw it in the trash, you have an engagement with that piece. And so, although it might take a little bit more time and energy- and sometimes more budget. To be able to pull off a print campaign, the visual time, the physical time spent with that piece is much longer than somebody swiping and deleting a digital communication. That often gets lost, don't get opened at all, get put in a spam folder. There's no spam folder at the mailbox.

Adrian Tennant: Great point. As regular listeners know, we love case studies on IN CLEAR FOCUS. So Betsy, can you give us an example of a result a client got from a physical campaign that surprised them or something they didn't expect going in?

Betsy Davis: I think I can probably give you two. One was with a health care customer insurance and health care network hospitals. And those types of things and they actually did what i just talked about. When they combine their digital with their mail and they use the platform that we offer called mail path that allows them to use sales force and their marketing cloud platform that they're using for all their digital engagements. We built a custom application that allows marketers to put direct mail into that same campaign and also trigger it through salesforce. So it becomes a very hands-off piece, just like their digital. It's just triggering and coming to us. So it takes away all of that physical interaction and back and forth emails. And once we set it up, it's easy and triggered just like a digital campaign. So they ran that. They saw a 13% response versus 1%, 2%, that they were used to seeing with their mail campaigns, which usually saw a higher response- was up double digits. So, perfect example of when they combine the two: use technology to automate it, make it easier on everybody, get quicker, the right message at the right time, those types of things that we say all the time. That's one. The other thing that I think about is the J.Crew catalog. J.Crew decided to bring back their catalog, and it became this movement. Everybody was talking about it, they did a great job with the PR, but we even took it a step further and created the catalog in a little bitty mini version. It looked just like the catalog, but we created it in this little mini style. They ended up posting it on their Instagram feeds, and had videos of the little catalogs coming out of their pocket. And so it became this really cute, fun way to take their physical catalog piece and make it a fun, really interesting, real and Instagrammable moment that we helped them create. So it became this conversation piece that they didn't anticipate, which was fun.

Adrian Tennant: Love that. Let's take a short break. We'll be right back after this message.

Adrian Tennant: Welcome back. I'm speaking with Betsy Davis of Sandy Alexander, where she's also co-host of the Color Bar podcast. So-called ‘phygital’ media connects a printed piece to QR codes, personalized URLs, and data triggers. Betsy, what can the consumer journey look like for someone who gets one of these campaigns in their mailbox?

Betsy Davis: Yeah, it's exactly what you experience when you scan a QR code off of a menu. You know, when we're trying to log into our Netflix and scan the QR code, we're incorporating those now into mail. So it's going to take you to that brand's website so you can immediately start to shop. Oftentimes it's going to be a personalized engagement where they're taking you to a specific page that's personalized to you, for you to start engaging with the brand in a way that they know that you expect or a product that you've been looking at. And so we can do even personalized QR codes that take you to a personalized landing page, that's specific to your needs and what your wants are for that particular brand. So it does exactly what we just said. It takes you from a physical piece directly into what you're used to engaging with them in a digital environment, typically a website of some sort.

Adrian Tennant: Relatedly, personalization at scale depends on data. Which inputs actually drive the decision about what message a specific person gets and which ones turn out to matter less than marketers assume?

Betsy Davis: Yeah, I would say that the ones that are really using their data, not just name and address, but really understanding lifetime value of that consumer. If you think about the hospitality space, casinos and hotels and cruise lines, they really understand their data and really use it well. And so it's not just- I'm female, so I have a female image on the front of my postcard. I was just in Vegas last week, so this is a perfect example. They know that I'm not a gambler, but that I do love fine dining, and I do love a spa moment. And I'm going to go to the pool, and I'm going to go see a concert. So whenever I get my direct mail piece now from those resorts, I'm not going to have a reference to the slot machines. Mine are going to be special offers for those particular engagements that I typically lean to, and they also know how much I spend. So they know how much I spent, and you spent, and somebody else spent. And so the offers begin to change very fluidly. Those are the levels of personalization that really make a strong impact. And what's interesting is that you as a recipient don't know that somebody down the street has one that looks completely different from yours, based on their spending habits. You just know that it resonates with you and that it feels like they know you as one of their loyalists. That's kind of a great example of how people really tap into and get the most out of personalization.

Adrian Tennant: As you know, there is a point where personalization stops feeling relevant and starts feeling intrusive. Yes. Some brands find their most loyal customers want more data-driven marketing, not less. Where's the line, do you think, between useful and the creep factor? And how do you help a brand stay on the right side of it?

Betsy Davis: Yeah, I think a lot of times we have to think about who is the end recipient. So if you think about companies like a Disney, a Universal, where it's very family oriented. A Great Wolf Lodge, and some of these people we don't even work with, but I'm just thinking of if we were to consult with them, this is going to a family. So you don't want to start referencing the kids. You don't want to kind of cross the line where it feels like you've gone too deep into the family dynamic kind of moment. But you do want to show them that you know you're going to Epcot, you're not going to Disneyland, you know, those types of things. And so it really, again, feels like you know them. I talked to a client recently, and he's a huge Star Wars guy. And he was like, I sometimes get communications. I'm surprised that they aren't referencing Star Wars and my communications that they're sending me. It feels like they don't know me. So like you hear people saying they don't know me well enough. If you're a luxury brand and people are spending big money with you, a car, a major purchase, people want to feel like you know that they understand, that you've just spent a large portion of money engaging with their brand. And so there's different just levels of whether it's the demographic that you're talking to, whether it's the value of the product that you're buying. That's when we start to really think about “How do we really want to use personalization?” Nonprofits, they talk a lot about how specific we want to get. So it just depends on the vertical. It depends on who you're talking to and the product that you're selling, I think, is a lot of things to consider whenever you're talking about how not to cross over into creep factor. Yeah.

Adrian Tennant: Now at Sandy Alexander, you're piloting a product called DM AI that embeds an AI agent in direct mail via a QR code. So the piece can actually hold a conversation with the recipient. Betsy, what can a brand learn from those AI based exchanges that standard response mechanisms never captured?

Betsy Davis: Yeah, it's really fascinating, actually, and we're obsessed with this product. You are having a legitimate conversation with an AI agent sitting in your living room. So you get the direct mail piece, you scan the QR code. These are also personalized, so we know that Adrian has just gotten this direct mail piece. So when the AI agent comes on, it's, “Hi, Adrian, what can I help you with today?” So again, personalization. But if it's about a particular product and you start to ask questions around specifications, the height, the size, it might be about a car. Is it a V8? Is it a V6? What's the cost differential between the two? What service centers do I have in my area that I live in? So whatever these questions are, we're actually capturing that. And so we can offer both a transcribed written conversation point or even a recorded conversation that we can share back to the brands. And so now the brands are actually able to see truly, what are people wanting to know? What are people really asking questions about? And so that allows marketers to change the messaging potentially after a campaign and repurpose that same QR agent to be able to have a different conversation. But what it also does, if you think about it from a more of a B2B application, you can feed that to your salespeople and the salespeople know, okay, they engaged with this. These are the questions. Now the salesperson's calling and having a very intelligent conversation with that recipient versus a very cold call. Now you can say, “I heard that you were interested in this part of the product” or “You were curious about these specifications”, and you could immediately go into really what the core need is or core pain point is of the recipient and get right to it. So pretty remarkable. Cause again, if it's just a normal QR code that goes to a website, yes, you can kind of see where they're going and what products they're seeing. But to have a real conversation and understand what they're really thinking and wanting to know about is pretty powerful. Yep.

Adrian Tennant: Well, artificial intelligence now helps marketers generate copy variants, optimize send timing, and personalize down to the individual level, as we've been discussing. Betsy, where is it genuinely changing what you can offer clients?

Betsy Davis: Yeah, I mean we're doing a lot of what we've always done from a personalization perspective. AI is just allowing us to do it faster and doing it even at a larger scale. So for some customers, and this was the conversation years ago, we have a ton of data and we have no idea what to do with it because we don't have the bandwidth to scrub it and to really understand what we have, what the power that we have at our fingertips. AI now allows us to do that. So it allows us to get to and segment data much quicker. It allows us to create content much quicker. Even with assets that people have sitting in a library, that was also something we struggled with years ago. We have all these assets and no way to organize them. no way to really tap into the 1200 visual assets that we have that could create a custom piece for every person. AI now allows us to do that and allows our customers to feel like they're more equipped to be able to work with all the data points and all the assets they have that they can put to use. So that's been the most powerful thing, I think, for us. And then again, from a production perspective, just streamlining. And so it allows us to get to market quicker. And so it might have taken six days. Now with things like AI helping us on our manufacturing floors and technology, maybe we've straightened that down to three days now.

Adrian Tennant: For marketers, AI is literally everywhere. Probably every other email I get is about some new AI service or vendor. I'm interested to know where you think the hype around AI is running ahead of what it actually delivers today.

Betsy Davis: I've had a lot of conversations with people that have come on my podcast or that we've had on some of our panel discussions, and I think what all of us continue to come back to is there still has to be a human element to it. There still has to be some humility. There still has to be just that human touch. what we're trying to say. I think we're now recognizing when AI wrote the email, we're recognizing when it was AI generated content, and it starts to lose some of that human touch. And so I think, yes, it allows us to be quicker, it allows us to move faster, utilize all the things that we have. But there still needs to be people really ensuring that it is the right message. at the right time and still feels very true to the brand. I think we can't lose sight of what we bring to the table as well. Yeah.

Adrian Tennant: Well, as you mentioned, you have a podcast called Color Bar, which you launched in April last year. And as a fellow host, I'm curious, what surprised you most about building a content brand inside a B2B company?

Betsy Davis: I actually was just on a webinar yesterday talking about this very thing. And you know what? It kind of fits what I just said. It brought a very human element to it. It was no longer just hardcore selling print. And that wasn't even selling. It was having a conversation. It was sitting down, talking about AI. It was sitting down and talking about sometimes very personal things with our guests that were CEOs of companies or leading the marketing teams of some of the brands that we worked with. But there became a human element. And I think it broke down the barriers of we're not just here to sell all the time. We want to learn from one another. We all want to make each other better at what we're doing. And we also want to share that knowledge with people that are listening and also trying to be better at what we're all out here doing, whether it's business or life. Yeah, obviously, there was content, but there was also this kind of human connection that came to be a part of it that everybody really responds well to. And when it feels like you're really trying to help each other succeed and just share knowledge and share our learnings, it changes the dynamic completely. And for us, it made content more accessible. It made it not so overthought. Like when you get in a conversation like you and I are having and it just is flowing, it doesn't feel contrived, and it doesn't feel like it's this kind of hard sell pitch. And I think it opens people up. So it's been a fun process for sure.

Adrian Tennant: Yeah, I know it sort of keeps you on your toes.

Betsy Davis: Yes, 1000%.

Adrian Tennant: You know, we've been thinking a lot about retail. We're in the busiest quarter of the year traditionally for retail. Experiential and pop-up activations certainly keep growing. Where do you think physical brand expression goes over the next three to five years?

Betsy Davis: I saw something recently, and we don't do business with them, but we do a lot in the dining industry. And so we kind of keep an eye on what the dining industry is doing, because it's all about an in-person experience. But how are some of those marketers standing out against the others? And I saw recently a post with Chili's. Who's done a ton, you hear a lot about what the marketing teams at Chili's are doing right now, and they were at a golf tournament in a golf cart and had a whole experience that was, I'll say it again, out in the wild, engaging with people in an environment where you typically don't see the Chili's, right? And so, you know, they've also done things where they've had pop-up shops in Times Square, and it was the only place that you could get a new menu item was in Times Square over these two days. And so I think it's making those very unexpected experiences happen where you don't expect to see the brand. And I think it's also those pop-up moments give you the opportunity to do something really over the top and make it feel like this very limited VIP moment if people get to experience it. And that's when you start to see the digital side come into play. That's when you see the influencers start to pop up. And that's when you see these viral moments happen. So I think that's what's going to continue to happen in these experiential moments. I think about somebody that we actually had on one of our webinars, an agency out of Chicago where Hey Dudes, the shoes, Hey Dudes, they had a whole setup at New York Fashion Week. And so what you think of as this very kind of casual shoe showing up at New York Fashion Week, besides Chanel, there was just this, whoa, what just happened there kind of moment. That's what I think brands are going to start to lean into, would be my gut. Yeah.

Adrian Tennant: Great conversation. Betsy, if listeners would like to learn more about Sandy Alexander's products and services or hear your podcast, Color Bar, what are the best ways to do so?

Betsy Davis: Yeah, so for all of the above, you can visit us at sandyalexander.com. Everything that we do, a gallery of our work, our case studies, even every podcast that we host, we load to our website. So you can go to our news and insights page and see all the amazing content and then scroll around on our website. We also are on LinkedIn and we're always posting really great case studies of work that we're doing and sharing some of those experiential moments that we've talked about today and direct mail pieces that we're doing just to keep everybody's creative juices flowing. So you can also find us on LinkedIn.

Adrian Tennant: Perfect. Betsy, thank you very much for being our guest this week on IN CLEAR FOCUS.

Betsy Davis: This was great.

Adrian Tennant: Thanks again to my guest this week, Betsy Davis of Sandy Alexander. You can hear Betsy co-hosting Sandy Alexander's own podcast, Color Bar, wherever you get your podcasts. As always, you'll find a complete transcript of our conversation with timestamps and links to the resources we discussed on the IN CLEAR FOCUS page at Bigeyeagency.com. Thank you for listening to IN CLEAR FOCUS, produced by Bigeye. I've been your host, Adrian Tennant. Until next week, goodbye.

Timestamps

00:00: Introduction to IN CLEAR FOCUS

00:21: Meet Betsy Davis

02:13: Learning from the Production Side

03:44: Rebranding Sandy Alexander

05:08: The Marth Group Acquisition

06:54: Print vs. Digital: Unique Benefits

07:55: Combining Print and Digital for Success

09:42: Engagement and Trust Factors

10:57: Case Studies: Surprising Results

13:20: Phygital Media and Consumer Journeys

15:40: Personalization at Scale

17:20: Finding the Balance in Personalization

19:20: AI in Direct Mail Campaigns

22:04: AI's Impact on Marketing Efficiency

24:26: The Human Element in AI

26:13: Future of Physical Brand Expression

28:32: Closing Remarks and Resources

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