As we all know, the first challenge of any direct mail item is to get the recipient to open up, to interrupt the habitual response which results in unwanted items being transferred from post box to waste bin in a matter of seconds. Of course, there will always be those saddos with nothing better to do than to read everything that crosses their path regardless of its utility. These are the sort of people who usually wind up blogging about it. Endlessly. Moronically.
Nobody cares about these types, certainly not the producers of the direct mail. They want customers, people who will respond to a carefully-crafted daub of pigmented liquid deposited on a flat cellulose-based substrate in such a way as will, ultimately, result in them handing over some money. Marketing folk like to dress it up in terms of ‘building a relationship’ or ‘having a conversation’ with the customer but, hey, what do they know? As Bill Hicks once put it, they are merely “Satan’s spawn filling the world with violent garbage…”
But back to the question of how to get the attention of these very important people who, as we all know equally well, are being bombarded with up to 3,000 commercial messages every day? Great, great photography works for me, as does a beautiful piece of print but part of it is also being able to elicit the right question, particularly if that question is, “What the….?”
That’s the tactic of this four-page direct mail piece from a bank which is printed CMYK plus a special [insert bank brand here] red on coated stock and then die-cut and folded to represent the face of an over-large Motorola pager.
“Why?” you might ask. Indeed, that is the question. It is an excellent question. It is the question that the creators of this piece are hoping will become irresistible to all people who receive it, driving them to rip open the flimsy polythene enclosure and satisfy their curiosity for once and for all.
It’s a brilliant idea alright, but only brilliant with the right people. I picked it up and my first response was, “Pager? Why would I want a stupid pager?” There is no hope.
