
Personalised Stamps
Issue 14 | March 2010
Agency
Saatchi & Saatchi DGS New Zealand
Creative Team
Creative Director: Matt Shirtcliffe, Copywriter: Matt Shirtcliffe, Senior Art Director: Jeff Harris, Art Director: Arnya Karaitiana
Production Team
Production Manager: Heath Davis
Other Credits
Manager, Market Engagment & Capability: Fiona Woolley Senior Account Manager: Alex Hamilton
Date
November 2009
Background
New Zealand Post wanted to maximise its sponsorship of the Advertising Effectiveness awards by demonstrating the effectiveness of personalised mail. The problem is, DM is rarely the top-of-mind mediuym for effectiveness and, indeed, the awards themselves were dominated by the broadcast media channels. Rather than competing, the agency decided the best opportunity was to create a highly personalised follow-up.
Idea
It’s you – on a stamp! The awards night was an opportunity for everyone to look their best. So a great portrait photographer was hired to take photographs of all the great and the good in advertising and marketing who were at the awards night. Each of those shots was then turned into a sheet of personalised stamps, which were mailed as a total surprise within days of the awards.
Results
The results were overwhelmingly positive. Our client was inundated with positive emails and requests for reprints of the stamps. The competition element that encouraged them to use one of their stamps received a 20% response rate. And in a highly competitive industry, one Creative Director from a rival agency was so impressed he began Tweeting about what he’d just received in the mail.
Our Thoughts
This is pretty much the same problem that AnPost faced (on pages xx). Where they were talking to marketers, New Zealand Post was addressing the toughest audience of them all, advertising folk. How do you get people who would much rather shoot a TV commercial to consider mail in their campaign planning? Here’s how, by demonstrating how very arresting personalization can be. Will it get dyed-in-the-wool creative directors wanting to create mailshots as well as 48-sheets? Maybe that’s a bridge too far but it will certainly have got some of the better planners thinking.