It’s not easy persuading people to get their eyes tested. Most of us think our eyesight is fine even though there’s a good chance it's deteriorated over time.
Many high street optometrists offer free tests, making their money out of the specs they then sell you. Eyelevel is no different – except that it wants to be seen as friendlier than the other oculists.
This customer retention mailing has a real sense of personality which will help Eyelevel get under the radar and not only be noticed but remembered.
The idea is wonderfully simple. It’s to anthropomorphise the envelope. The two windows of the envelope look very much like specs and the addresses printed behind them look like peering eyes.
Witty, don’t you think? And the message is conveyed pretty much before the recipient has had to read the letter inside.
What we like about it is that someone at Elvis actually thought about the problem. One way of getting Mr John Sample to open the envelope would be to offer some financial inducement. Money off when you get your eyes tested… that sort of thing.
The envelope message pretty much tells you what the whole thing is about but because you’re smiling you want to find out if there’s another smile within.
Now, in his book Cutting Edge Advertising, Jim Aitchison suggests that before they sit down to write an ad, creatives should have a good long think about what sort of ad they want to write. A letter or a postcard.
A letter is a piece of communication in which you take time (and trouble) to develop a theme. It’s where you declare your love over several pages, expounding on the worthlessness of life without the object of your affections in it. A postcard is a quick reminder. See you Thursday, room booked in name of Smith, xx.
It’s the long copy versus the no copy approach.
Sir John Hegarty has argued that people don’t have time to read verbiage any longer and that copywriters are already being hunted down and disposed of. And it’s true that award-winning press ads at Cannes are now all desperately formulaic, intriguing visuals with the explanation in 12-point type down in the bottom right-hand corner of the layout next to the logo. But, as Howard Gossage wrote, ‘People will read anything that interests them and occasionally that may even be an advertisement.’
Neil French once wrote a thousand words under the headline ‘No one reads long copy any longer. Here’s why.’
Now it may sound perverse to suggest that every creative team has the same decision to make when they set about answering a brief for a piece of direct mail because it’s always gonna be a letter, innit?
Well, yes and no. Take this idea from Elvis. It looks like a letter but it works like a poster. The communication is almost instant. The same for Publicis Dialog’s Zurich mailing. You get it in a second.
Saatchi’s envelope for the National AIDS Trust, Ogilvy Singapore’s huge envelope and letter inviting marketers to the Global Brand Forum (‘The giants of marketing are coming’), Ingo Blinds’ amusing reveal as you pull out the letter and Tribal DDB’s letter for Schwarzkopf - these are all posters in intent, even if they do have stamps on them.
On the other side of the coin, when you do have plenty to say, revel in saying it. Wunderman London’s campaign for Rolls Royce, for instance. The central idea here was to talk about the time and attention to detail that goes into every car. To make the point tellingly, the letter was seven revelling pages long.
Tribal DDB’s lo-o-o-ong letter describing the new longer Golf had a point to it as well as plenty to say.
Many direct mail letters, though, seem to be neither one thing nor the other. Either a simple thought that has been bloated to last four long paragraphs or a theme truncated prematurely.
So, next time you get a brief to produce a piece of direct mail, ask yourself exactly what it is you want to write.
The Elvis mailing seems to me to be a postcard. It just looks like a letter.