Love Letters
Issue 19 | June 2011
Agency
TBWA Group Belgium
Creative Team
Creative Director: Frank Marinus; Copywriter: Tom De Vliegher; Art Director: Philip De Cock
Production Team
Online Design: An Gielens; Online Production: Jan Bikkembergs, Ken Kools, Geert Broeders, Kristof Massoela
Other Credits
Account Team: Nancy Vanlerberghe, Michael Renier, Benedicte Ernst; Client Team: Christ’l De Jonghe, Peter De Fre, Els Lagrou, Gregory Schiltz
Date
April - May 2011
Background
In the new world of emails, the sending of actual letters has been declining. Belgian Post wanted to achieve two goals. Firstly, to make people understand and engage with their new positioning based around the line ‘The Post takes care of it’. And secondly, to get people to write letters.
Idea
Have you ever wished that an expert could help you? Wouldn’t it be great if a famous writer could help you compose a declaration of love? That’s what Belgian Post did, they hired 4 celebrities to act as love-letter ghost writers for ordinary Belgians. This offer was picked up immediately by the media, which boosted traffic to the love letter website.
The way it worked is that online you filled in the name and address of your loved one. Then you saw how the famous writer wrote down the name of your darling. And you watched the letter get posted and, on Google Maps, get winged to the address of that very special person.
The next day, the object of your desire receives your handwritten letter and within it there is a unique url that drives them to watch a video of how their letter came to be
Because a letter written on paper is more powerful and authentic than an e-mail or text, so every letter that got delivered was a great way to prove the relevance of the mail.Note please that Belgian Post did not fight against digital media but recognized how online tools when used in conjunction with offline approaches can create more of a buzz than either could on its own.
Results
In one month 22.000 letters were sent.
The Love letters website received 100,000 unique visitors.
Our Thoughts
This is Cyrano de Bergerac made real. You want to woo the object of your affections with uncommon skill and art, to make them defy logic and defy your own expectations and return your feelings. Not a bad description of brand advertising, actually. But in this case an involving little demonstration of how nothing quite matches the power of a letter.
Seriously, would a text message have quite the same effect? Of course not.
Everything has its place in the media mix but when you really mean something, when you are trying to be as honest as you can be, that’s when you write a letter.
Brands who have active retention programmes know this to be true as, indeed, do brands who have screwed up and have discovered that in saying sorry they have grown their business.