We asked our CEO and Creative Director to cast their busy yet experienced eyes over some recent Direct Mail work. Here's what we eventually got out of them. Next up, our CD, Chris Martin:
Clients seem to be falling out of love with DM (with budgets slashed, costs spiraling and trends dictating that everything should be social, digital, co-creative). Even the postage is going up, so the odds are stacking up against poor old DM.
Yet recent research has proven that younger people in particular love this engaging and personal dark art of mail...and the industry is waking up to this.
But DM seems to be shorthand for keeping in contact with those of failing eyesight, a propensity to sponsor starving African children, take cruises, replace their car every two years, need hip replacement surgery or want to put up bespoke blinds in their conservatories.
I'll steer clear of the technical and targeting side of things and concentrate on the creative. Well, what there is of it.
The first thing that strikes me is the multi-coloured-ness. These DM packs have used just about every hue imaginable. My mail is more demure than this. It's boring, and mainly in differing shades of white. Do old people need to be smacked in the face with colour to wake them up or something?
First up is a brown wallet thingy for Kwik-Fit. A wallet hey?. That old chestnut. Younger readers will not necessarily be aware of all the great DM cliches, but a wallet is pretty high up there. Personalised? Tick. Plastic card? Tick. Intricate foldy-outy bits? Something that painfully tries to emulate a traditional letter? Offers? Tick tick tick.
But you know what? I bet it worked. It's cute, gets the much vaunted 'cut through', is relevant and says what it needs to. It won't win any gongs or many friends, but for what it is, it's OK.
Let me explain my ire. It's got nowt to do with aesthetics. It's the assumptions of lazy marketers that 'old' people are stupid, tasteless, brainless and have not moved on with the times. And it's all based on an outdated model of what a 60 year old is like.
A 60 year old nowadays was in their early 20s when Led Zeppelin were at their pomp. They saw punk change things before they were 30. They probably broke laws. Had fights. Rode bikes. At the very worst, they probably got down to The Bay City Rollers and watched Morecambe and Wise on telly.
These people are not all elasticated waistband wearing, bread and dripping eating Arthur Askey fans. They're real, relevant people. And if they want to read, they wear glasses (or get laser correction surgery). Might I remind you that The Telegraph's body copy is set in 7pt. So why do some companies constantly treat them all like dribbling nostalgic idiots?
Finally, a cruise piece for Hurtigruten.
Along with the treatment of 60 year olds, close on my list of DM pet-hates is the regression towards self-mailers. Yes, I know they're cheap and efficient. They can even be clever. But they feel cheap, and this one's trying to sell me a luxury adventure cruise to North Norway (South Norway is so last year).
At least they've gone for a contemporary look. The images are interesting and dynamic throughout, but there are lots of partner logos which confuse things a bit. The text isn't in idiot jumbo size, but it all feels a bit thrown together (and the odd foldy-format makes it nigh on impossible to track any narrative).
There's a story here but it's hidden. DM packs were conceived, more often than not, on the tenors of logic. Of storytelling. Of involvement. Of explanation. Of whetting appetites and trying to elicit an action. This piece is a wonderful example of how these things have sadly been sublimated. Sublimated by time pressures. By budget restraints. But ultimately messed up by a lack of understanding of how good DM can and actually should work.
Ay-Thang-Yaw'll. Need a lie down now. And some bread and dripping.
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