getting creative with spam

I've always been pretty glad I don't work in direct mail marketing. It must be a pretty tough task to come up with creative things to do with spam all day long.

Here's the first bit of direct mail that I've ever got that I've found interesting though (it wasn't actually for me it was for Salma). 

It's basically playing off on two things.

Personalisation: The age old trick of DM that if you personalise a message you get a better take up rate. This has gone a step further and turned the personalistaion into a unique web address made of Salma's name (www.thethrill.co.uk/salmakadir). 

Intrigue: In no way does it even hint at what it's for. It's just a big fish on a hook hoping that the intrigue of what could be on the web page of your name will drive you there. And it did for me, as I imagine it did for more than the usual amounts of others.

It was trying to sell magazine subscriptions to friends of people who already have subscriptions by the way.

making the invisible visible

Another nice thing about the way digital is going at the minute is that it is getting better and better at turning invisible things into visible things.

This for example...

Will turn a walk around my living room into this..

What once was an unquantifiable thing is now a real life graph.

And twitter turns random thoughts that lived in peoples heads into things that other people can now see.

I'm sure there are loads of other examples but I only needed two to make my point.

Vaguely related posts: numbers and pictures, as if by magic

let the label do the talking

 

Labels are great. They're free media space which you own and you can tell your story in. Right there and then in the shops, just when someone is about to make up their mind to buy you or not. Making a feature or icon of your label can only be a good thing. Jack Daniels are onto a good thing here.

Vaguely related posts: money for old rope, driving traffic, on shelf

risk & reward

Two important concepts. Best illustrated with an example as always.

Risk (to the brand for buying lots of space and not putting a logo in it).

Reward (to the audience when they get it).

Vaguely related post: 1+1

your daily aphorisms

 

Daily Aphorisms from The School of Life.

Vaguely related posts: thought for food

small, big changes

Some companies, brands and politicians are going through 'the change' far better than others. It just takes a few regular small steps to keep yourself agile enough to stay ahead in my opinion. 

Creative Review being a great example in my mind of someone keeping their eye on the ball and their changing market place and reacting accordingly.

thought for food

If you're stuck for something to do, do this. I'm highly likely to recommend a friend as we say in the advocacy game. I won't tell you any more as it will spoil it for you, in fact I'm already spoiling it with this.

Good conversation and good food. Where can you go wrong? 

bloody nora

I won my first award for a while the other day. I couldn't find a camera so had to scan it in. It was for the careers section of the innocent site. Which is nice as wooing and recruiting smart people is quite important to us.

4 predictions about the future from 1984 (3 of them correct)

With surprising accuracy, Nicholas Negroponte (founder of MIT Media Lab) predicts what will happen with CD-ROMs, web interfaces, service kiosks, the touchscreen interface of the iPhone and his own One Laptop per Child project.

Scary stuff. Wonder if he can do the 3:15 at Doncaster next week?

as if by magic

I never really thought about how twitter turns this..

into this..

until the other day (turning the link from a big long thing into a neater tinyurl thing basically). It happens behind the scenes, in an instance. As if by magic. And it's great. 

The very best uses of technology are normally invisible like this, there should be more of them. Especially between this social media stuff.