It’s an office tradition as old as pretending not to hear the marital phone fight in the next cubicle – passing a greeting card around the office for people to sign. This month, the large global advertising firm DraftFCB embarked on a similar task when it sought to send a card to the Coalition for the Homeless on behalf of its employees to accompany a charitable donation it made for the holidays.
Yet, with clients and employees spread throughout the world, signing a greeting card seemed nearly impossible…until the company turned to the Auto-Graph, a robotic arm that uses a Sharpie (a DraftFCB client) to sign documents remotely.
Visitors to a special website simply typed in their name and city, and then used their mouse or touch-sensitive screen to sign an enormous 10’-x-12’ card miles – and sometimes continents – from where it was. In all, more than 3,200 signatures were collected by Dec. 7.
