What is the Matter box?

Matter is a very simple idea, it’s roughly 10 items each created from a different brand, put in a box, delivered to consumers’ homes on a Saturday morning.

My job personally is to manage that consumer experience and my criteria for that experience is, is this worth putting the kettle on and having a cup of tea with and spending an hour with? 

This is the pilot box that we did. This is the very first box that we, that went out. And one of the pieces we did in here was this piece from Nissan. They look like crayons but they are in actual fact soap. And if you smell it, it actually really smells like soap.

And the reason being that Nissan is a brand that is all about what you don’t expect, and if you look at Nissan’s product range now it’s all crossovers and kind of vehicles that don’t fit. They’re part car, part SUV or part this and part that, this, that and the other. And this piece was really about telling a story about Nissan which is told through the little booklet here that people wouldn’t ordinarily expect.

But there’s an interesting anecdote to this. I, many, many months after this piece went out I ran into somebody who said, ‘oh, yeah, I got Matter box’.  And I said, ‘oh, which bit did you like the best?’  And she said, ‘oh, the Nissan piece was my favourite piece’. And I said, ‘oh, and, you know, what kind of, what do you remember about it?  What effect did it have?’  And she said, ‘well, I definitely paid a lot more attention to Nissan. I used to look at them when they drive down the street and I used to kind of stare wistfully into their dealerships as I drove past but nothing really more than that.

‘But,’ she said, ‘I did notice something very interesting. A few months ago they announced their first ever quarterly loss. It was on the financial thing on the radio.’  And she said, ‘Do you know what? I realised I felt sorry for them.’  And this was a very clear indication of the power of an object to actually engage people to such an extent that you would have an emotional empathy with that brand. I think that’s quite an achievement.

Matter is best described as tangible advertising. It’s a three dimensional advertising medium and I’ll stress that it’s actually, it’s designed primarily as a brand communications medium. So it more fits under the umbrella of advertising rather than direct marketing. And, by definition, it’s not direct because there isn’t a direct relationship between the brands and the consumers. The consumers are Matter subscribers.

But more importantly there’s no editorial content to interrupt. The advertising is the content, and when you join up to the Matter box site we make it crystal clear to people that you are going to receive advertising and that’s why you’re joining. And in fact that’s why we didn’t think we were going to get hordes of consumers because we didn’t think hordes of consumers would be interested in receiving advertising, but it turns out they are.

And advertising occupies an important part of our culture in that everybody is quite proud of the standard of UK advertising and the creativity that goes on with it, within it and because Matter is a creatively driven medium, people are interested in getting it.

And we can make it work as a non-interruptive medium partly because we insist that the brands are creative within it and also partly because nowadays the kind of interruptive model of trying to divert people’s attention away from something doesn’t really work.

We’ve, that model’s kind of been outmoded now and Matter is a modern, it’s a modern medium that it might be physical but it’s part of the digital landscape and its consumers are very digitally sophisticated. Its language is very digital in the way that it works, you have to go online to join it and you go online in order to respond to it. And we’re part of the modern world and not part of the traditional world, so that’s why we didn’t want to, we’ve resisted, we resisted early on calls to put editorial in there.

It’s primarily a chance for brands to engage with consumers and get them to feel different about their brand, and it’s based round a very, very simple insight which is gift-giving. If I give you a gift you’re going to feel better about me, and brands are ultimately in the business of getting consumers to feel good about them. So what simpler way of doing it than give a gift to consumers?

This is another piece we did which, this was a joint thing between Jordans Cereals and Penguin Books, and it’s a sample of cereal with a poem on the back and it’s all about turning breakfast into a literary moment because you always read whatever’s on the back of a cereal packet.

This is a piece for Stolichnaya Vodka and it’s a little enamel badge that you can put on your Fruit Pastilles hat in the winter, and it’s a sort of pocket guide to Russian culture.  And buried deep inside here is an invitation to a warehouse party which they got, another one they got oversubscribed to.

This is pots of Play-Doh for Sony Bravia to back up the TV ads that they were running of the Play-Doh rabbits going through the thing. And another kind of, quite a little interesting anecdote to this that we, the Play-Doh pots were random in terms of the colours that they got; and one of the Matter subscribers is a pair of kind of conceptual artists who I know called Rebecca and Mike. They were one of the first subscribers, and of course they got a black one and a white one and seeing as Sony’s all about colour they thought that was quite amusing.

This is a little, he’s called a Music Monster for Sony Ericsson and he’s a little phone charm, you tie him to the end of your mobile phone. And we got sent, some months ago we got sent a picture of Jonathan Ross, and the picture of Jonathan Ross had appeared full page on the front of The Times and it was on the Times Online and everything else in the middle of his big hoohah with Russell Brand. And there, attached to his little man bag under his arm is the little Sony Ericsson Music Monster, which is a very good example of how you can, how one physical item can then ultimately reach millions and millions of people.

And this was, Evo is a car magazine and we did some, this is a set of top trumps that we did for car nuts, introduced people to the kind of experience. Evo’s whole thing is all about the thrill of driving so they rate their favourite performance car through the cards.

Original Source used Matter as a sampling exercise. We got a vast amount of feedback from our subscribers telling us exactly what they liked about the flavour and how they, how much they liked it and how they used it, what they didn’t like. So much so that they came back and went into the second Matter box in December and we were able to give them over 500 comments back from our subscribers, which was quite astonishing really.