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Preloads and auto-run on USB flash drives |
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Blog -
Data Preloads
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Wednesday, 12 September 2007 |
Many of our customers choose to auto-run their marketing material, such as presentations, URLs or movies upon insertion of the USB device into the PC.
When opting for a data pre-load you are starting out with the need to make a general choice: Do you want an un-erasable data preload, so that the receiver is not able to erase your data but still can use the rest of flash drive just as usual? Or maybe you prefer the erasable preload so that your customer may erase your data and use the full capacity for own uses?
As next you need to think about whether you want any applications to auto-run upon device insertion. This could be a short *.mpg movie, a photo gallery, the opening of a URL in the system default browser and so on. Let us have a look at the pro’s and con’s of these different configurations from a marketing perspective.
Erasable data-preload
Pro: Ideal for use on seminars, workshops, schools and universities. Furbished with your data for a certain event, this is a less aggressive marketing approach suitable for education, governmental institutions and NGOs. The pre-load can also conveniently be erased or changed in case for any needs to update it’s content.
Con: The data contained on the USB flash drive can easily be erased by the receiver. This is not suitable for promotional give-aways or more aggressive product marketing targeting lasting effects, and that is more focused on high-volume customers and market penetration.
Un-erasable data-preload
Pro: Here we write your data into a separate partition on the NAND flash memory during production. After your data has been written into the hardware it cannot be changed with normal efforts.
This is the ideal mode for large-scale promotional give-away campaigns where lasting effect and brand recognition is targeted. Perfect in tandem-use with the automatic opening of your company’s website in the clients standard browser.
Con: Some computers are configured to refuse auto-run of inserted USB drives in order to protect against malice. Also auto-run mostly run on Windows computers only, so that those of your clients that use a different operating systems will not be able see the auto-run. The data and presentation itself though is still available from within the USB flash drive also if the auto-run function cannot be activated. Workaround: By not using the Windows auto-run option (autorun.inf with *.bat file for launching) but instead a command to open a URL, your company website can be opened on a Windows (2000/XP) computer.
For promotional use we recommend un-erasable pre-programming to open your company website or a certain presentation on that website. This makes it easy to dynamically change and update content on the server, all while the handed out promotional give-ways or USB webkeys can still be used – they only point to the dynamic content online! In another post we will have a closer look on how a typical auto-run is configured.
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