Herald on Sunday direct mail case study

As media audiences continue to fragment and splinter, traditional channels such as press and TV are having to fight harder than ever for their share of client budget. New Zealand newspaper the Herald on Sunday wanted to remain firmly on media agents’ radars, without resorting to the desperate price-cutting tactics of the TV networks, radio and other print publications.

A piece of research had uncovered an impressive statistic – the average reader spends an hour looking at the Herald on Sunday.

Agency DraftFCB New Zealand came up with a creative that illustrated this fact. It mailed media buyers a very long letter, 13,000 words to be precise, which takes exactly one hour to read.

This physical demonstration of the benefits of buying ad space in the newspaper made such an impact with its audience that it led to 70 full-page ad bookings in October, an increase of 70% on the same month in 2008.

It is the newspaper’s most successful direct marketing campaign to date, returning a weighty ROI of 15:1