Award-winning agency delivers the punchline with a touch of magic

MEDIA & MARKETING:Direct marketing mail accounts for 25% of all addressed mail received by consumers

‘LOVE ME or hate me but just don’t ignore me,” is a favourite saying of Gary Brown, chief executive of below-the-line agency RMG Target. Brown certainly wasn’t ignored by judges at the annual An Post Direct Marketing awards, with RMG winning a hatful of gongs as well as being named best direct mail agency for the fifth year in a row.

RMG Target’s activities last year included involvement in the Guinness 250th celebrations and the Big Switch campaign by An Bord Gáis. The company also worked on behalf of An Post to persuade 30,000 business executives to make more use of direct mail.

The creative solution was a postcard with a five cent coin affixed, a scratch panel and nothing else to identify the sender. The scratch panel revealed a personalised URL with a unique code. The personalisation continued online with each recipient being greeted by name by magician Keith Barry. After some mental illusion wizardry by Barry, the punchline was “what’s really amazing is that I’ve had your attention for the past three minutes”.

Though that campaign yielded good results, marketing by mail would appear to have taken a hit last year, as An Post’s mail volumes declined by 10 per cent. Addressed direct mail with a marketing slant accounts for one quarter of all addressed mail received by consumers. Financial firms are the biggest senders, followed by utilities and the charity sector. Campaigns created by Acorn Marketing for telecoms companies 3 Mobile and Eircom Business both won gold this year. Takeaways and restaurants are the largest volume source of unaddressed direct mail.

Direct mail is widely used for business to business marketing, though prompting the recipients to take action is always a challenge. Mail fulfilment company Tico sent 200 potential customers a letter asking the recipients, “Do you want to reduce your mailing cost?”, with an unpared pencil enclosed. Two days later a follow-up letter asked: “Don’t you want to pare back your mailing costs?” – this time with a sharpener enclosed.

Dialogue Marketing received an award for drumming up business on its own behalf too. The company targeted US firms looking to sell into Europe, using a creative theme centred on St Brendan, the Irish monk said to have discovered America in 550.

Recipients' names were engraved in the Celtic Ogham script on a stone to symbolise the proposition that Dialogue could be an Irish stepping stone to marketing activity for US firms exporting to Europe. Dialogue's more entertaining creativity was showcased at the awards ceremony, with a take on the much-spoofed Hitler bunker scene from the movie Downfall. To view the parody, search "Dialogue An Post Awards" on the Vimeo website.

Four years after selling his stock photography company Stockbyte to Getty Images for $135 million, Jerry Kennelly is back in business and recruiting senior designers for a new venture called Gustavo. The Kerry entrepreneur is coy about the new business. “We have been working on it for the last three years. It’s online and disruptive and built around very high-value-added intellectual property. The potential customer base is unlimited.” Kennelly has 25 people employed in Killorglin with another 10 staff in New York.

In his search for more staff, last week Kennelly attended an event organised by ad agency Ogilvy in Dublin, where creative directors reviewed the portfolios of 60 aspiring copywriters, art directors and designers. Kennelly’s focus with Gustavo is international and he has mixed views about creative standards in Ireland.

“Sometimes you wonder about the benchmarks of Irish creatives,” he says. “There is a tendency to focus on the domestic market instead of measuring up against international work. One problem is that there are too many people pressing buttons and approving marketing campaigns who are not competent to do so. With cheap technology, anyone can call themselves a designer or a photographer and a lot of them are just rubbish. Excellent creativity is just all about a simple, really well considered, clear and original idea.”

siobhan@businessplus.ie