Favorite Things: Direct Mail Done Right

"You've got to see this," said my friend and colleague Don as he slid one of the most engaging pieces of direct mail that I've seen in a long time across the table ... Hear my quick take in the video above. Here is the PURL (Personalized URL) used in the campaign – www.AcceptTheInvitation.com/DonaldCarstensen. An interesting takeaway? With campaigns like this, direct snail mail is almost becoming a boutique media for very small personal campaigns.

The Swing Marketing Advertised

If you haven't seen this already, check out this hilarious take from Project Cartoon. Jaded or frighteningly realistic? You be the judge.

This site is also a fun example of letting users under the hood to play around. If you click on the 'Create' link you can modify the 'toon and save it to a unique url that you can give to your friends who in turn will send it to their friends and ... I guess it's also an example of viral marketing. The real kicker? The cartoon's content itself isn't original to the site. It's a pretty prevalent cartoon. What's original here (beyond the funky Simpsons-esque design) is that it's user based and can truly grow like an open source project. The cartoonist is even adding new cells from users to subsequent versions.

Chuck Gets It

Larry points us to Slate where Seth Stevenson gives an Ad Report Card for the new "animated-reality" TV ads that Charles Schwab is using to announce their lower pricing structure. This article provides an in depth anatomy of an ad and is also a great example of targeting your message to an audience (men w/impotent anger who are upset at how their money is being managed). It even goes a level deeper and uses the media in a way that creates the right effect on this market segment (the ads leave you with a disrupted feeling -- it could really push the target audience into taking action). Kudos to Austin-based GSD&M for a kickin' strategy and execution. Well played. Quick things I love about these ads:

• The "Talk to Chuck" slogan. For the exact same reasons Slate points out. Saw it on a big billboard in Chicago and fell in love with it.
  
• The fact that for research Schwab created a "clutter reel" assembled of the bad advertising that is prevalent in financial services space (Adirondack chairs, sailboats, etc.).
• The strategic match up of a targeted message and a targeted media

The only thing they missed? Putting these sticky ads on their website. Cadillac and Snickers have this figured out. If you've created a remarkable, clutter-cutting ad that's getting some press and people want to watch it, shouldn't they go to your site to do it ...?

P.S. If you find a link to the Schwab ads, send it to me and I'll post it.

Mousetraps and Marketing Metrics

It's that time of year again. Last night I was walking through my basement and I turned on the furnace room light in time to see a mouse scurry away through a crack in the wall. Luckily, I had just reset all of my non-humane, old-school mousetraps with fresh peanut butter over the weekend.

As I was resetting the traps, my thoughts wandered to marketing metrics. (Yes. I am insane.) You see, for one of my clients the past month also marked the beginning of their fiscal year and they have been celebrating with a lot of strategizing and planning.

How does placing mousetraps throughout your home relate to planning your marketing? Easy. As I was dropping off the traps I thought of my "mousetrap results" from the past year. The two mice I caught were from the same trap location (downstairs bathroom next to the shower). In my mousetrap planning this is the equivalent of a marketing campaign that works. All six other traps that I've set are essentially unproven as they have yet to yield a result. Did I do anything different? No. I set all of the traps in the exact same location I've always set them.

Was this responsible, results-driven planning? If I wanted to make decisions based on actual results I should have set the proven trap next to the shower and tested some new trap locations. But I didn't and the only reason was because I didn't bother to consider the results.

Now you may think that these are just mousetraps and marketing planning is a much bigger deal that always gets more careful consideration. Really? Take a step back and look at your current plans? How many of your proven efforts from last year are you repeating? (Your answer should be all of them.) How many of your unproven efforts are scheduled to be repeated this year? (Your answer should be none of them.)

Or, worse yet, are you in the dark on your efforts because you don't track and measure them. To continue with my mousetrapping metaphor, that would be like setting several trays of poison out and a random dead mouse shows up. Which poison tray (marketing campaign) got the mouse (your results)? You'll never know. So you also need to take an even bigger step back and make sure you are measuring your efforts. Remember, you can't manage what you don't measure. For my money, you can't beat actionable ads and mousetraps that kill. Both are dependable, measurable, and provide results.

The Point? It's simple. Make sure you are tracking and measuring every ad, marketing campaign, and promotion you do. Then when it comes time to plan, repeat what really worked, try to fix what kind of worked, and test something new in place of the stuff that failed. Failure isn't bad. My direct marketing mentor always said you either want a clear success or a clear failure because they give you a result that you can read and take action on. In other words, you know something. So take some time and think through where you "trap your mice and your customers and remember you can improve both if you know where your results are coming from.

P.S. "Try something!" and "Test. Test. Test." are some of the rules of one of my favorite analytical minds, Dr. Gregory House of Fox's House M.D. This week one of my favorite business minds, Tom Peters, did a great post with a slide summing up "House-isms" that can be applied to direct marketing and really anything strategically focused. Enjoy.

Is That Crap Under My Windshield Wiper or Guerrilla Marketing?

Or is it all in the eye of the beholder?

I had a philosophical discussion with a co-worker today about a Chinese restaurant menu that got shoved under everyone's windshield wipers in the parking lot. I cited it as a prime example of guerrilla marketing gone wrong. I made my case by saying that the effort was untargeted (I, for example, hate Chinese food; therefore this offer is irrelevant to me). I could understand flyering someplace close by but this restaurant was hardly that. Plus they flyered an office with a huge dining center that is widely known to have decent food at unbeatable prices. Flyering any other lot in town would have been a better use your excess flyers.

I cite targeting as being a key distinction because that is what makes a marketing tactic like flyering unique and gives it the scrappy, strategic guerrilla-like quality. I was at a conference and a vendor flyered all of the attendees a rooms one morning with a special announcement. That's great. Across the hall? No flyers because the vendor only targeted their audience with this relevant message. In my mind there was nothing targeted about this menu thing. It didn't have proximity going for it (as I mentioned this place is across town). It wasn't appealing based on who was parking in the lot (we have a cafeteria). All they had left were people who like Chinese food. I think you could target better.

But I believe it was Tevye that said, "On the other hand ..." (Actually, it was my colleague Larry Miller who wished to remain anonymous. I shall refer to him as Chuck moving forward.)

Chuck said: Untargeted? Come now. Chinese food is a pretty ubiquitous food category. Why not carpet bomb parking lots of big employers? Plus employees of large offices have been known to keep menus on file for days when they feel like changing it up. And as direct marketing tells us, when you scale a program like this, only a handful need to convert to break even on the promotion (unless you print your menus on heavy, embossed stock and hire a Ph.D. to do your flyering).

So am I right or is Chuck? Dunno. I'm just a marketer. I say that not as a cop out but in my almighty deference to trackable results. Could be this menu thing sends the restaurant through the roof. But to quote a book I just began, "you can't manage what you don't measure." So in the end, flyer or don't flyer. You don't know for sure until you try it but you've got to track it so the next time the promo gets put on the table you have some results to make a more educated guess. NOTE: I didn't suggest that you'd know for sure but that experience gives you some intelligence to make a more educated guess the next time. Happy marketing.

FREE MARKETING ADVICE:
Incidentally, if the Chinese restaurant was my client and was hell bent on flyering with their menus here's what I'd do ... Print off some mailing labels with a special offer/call to action: "Bring this menu in for a 10% discount on your meal." That would be a simple, low-cost way to track your efforts and give you some insight into what's working. But we want them to keep their menus! Great, hook them up with a new one when they redeem the offer. Or just let them take it back with them. (And so what if they reuse it? It's still business that resulted from the sale.) But we want to flyer several different targets! How do we know which is which? Get different colored labels and color-code your targets. At the end of the day, you can track almost anything. And you should.

I love that ... "You can't manage what you don't measure."