Gold - MISEREOR Mailing Falling Letters
Issue 17 | December 2010
Agency
Kolle Rebbe, Hamburg
Creative Team
Creative Direction: Ales Polcar, Heiko Schmidt; Art Direction: Susanne Moebius, Reinard Krug; Copywriter: Henning Flohr
Production Team
Production Manager: Franziska Ziegler
Other Credits
Account Supervisor: Jessica Gustafsson
Date
February 2010
Background
The earthquake catastrophe in Haiti was covered in all media. Misereor wanted Germany’s top journalists not just to cover the misery caused by the earthquake but to get active themselves and help out with a donation.
Idea
To encourage as many important journalists and media decision-makers as possible to make a donation, they reduced the copy to a provocative demand: deeds, not words! And underlined the message with an attention-grabbing idea.
Results
Almost half of the approx. 500 journalists approached reacted to the mailing with a donation.
Our Thoughts
We unanimously chose this entry as it fulfilled its purpose in such a clever and imaginative way. Letters from charities can often be mawkish, and/or preachy and this can result in a kind of donation fatigue. They are also usually copy heavy and fail to immediately capture the attention of the recipient.
We all felt that this letter had a wow factor but was not gimmicky as the falling letters execution was completely relevant to the catastrophic earthquake in Haiti. Its brilliance is in reducing the copy to just ?Deeds not words,' and making it appear as if all the other letters had been shaken off. This conveys the scope of the disaster and how desperate the situation in Haiti was at that time.
We imagined the journalists for whom this letter was intended receiving their envelopes, opening them and having the letters fall all over their desks and on the floor. This wouldn't be a letter they could ignore, and they would probably be reminded of it days or even weeks later as they'd find tiny letters between the keys on their computer or on the floor.