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The physical objects have a very special role to play and whilst our head has kind of been turned by digital media recently I think that it’s easy to overlook that physical things have the ability to seduce us and make us feel things because we understand their particular language.
We’ve used a print media as a way of getting information and finding out how much things cost and where we can get them from for the last 500 years, but that’s not really what printing’s really good at. Printing is really good at making you feel something. You can hold something in your hand and get so much information from it. You can feel things from it through holding it and feeling it and touching it and feeling how heavy it is, what size it is, what texture it is.
All of that is very rich information that we just absorb. And now we’ve got the internet and digital media to tell us how much things cost and where to get them from and what the various offers are then printing’s free to seduce us really.
The spots in Matter are category exclusive, so any brand that’s in there won’t be in there with any of its direct competitors. Sort of, by definition all the brands will be complementary. We don’t make any judgement on whether the brands are cool or not, that’s not for us to make. So anyone can come in if they want to come in. But what we do insist that they do and what we help them to do is to create interesting, engaging items, things that people are going to want to spend time with and that are deemed to be kind of value. Now value can mean, doesn’t have to mean monetary value, so the things don’t have to cost a lot of money, they can be of entertainment value, an emotional value, an intellectual value. But they have to be something that people are going to enjoy getting and that exist as a gift. So what they’re not allowed to do is just throw a leaflet in because no one feels particularly good about getting a leaflet.
I had a funny conversation with the marketing director for Virgin Atlantic and he said, we’re going to make you this offer which is a free pass through the Virgin upper class lounge that they’d just built in Terminal 3. Fantastic offer. But he said, ‘there’s some restrictions to it’. And I said, ‘oh, yeah, what are they?’ And he said, ‘well, you’ve got to, you have to be already booked on Virgin economy, you have to be flying out of Terminal 3 because that’s where it is, and you have to be booked, and you have to be flying out by the end of April’, and this was going out at the beginning of February. And I said, ‘well, that’s still a fantastic offer but there’s quite a lot of restrictions. We’re only going to 900 people because of this pilot so I think the chances of, out of the Matter box subscribers the chances of them actually meeting this criteria in order to be able to get the passes, let alone whether they actually do or not, are going to be quite slim.’
We ran the offer for them and we gave away 89 passes, which is an astonishing amount. And of course because we ran the offer we were able to write to people and say, ‘how you did hear about this’? And we were right, only two of them were Matter box subscribers. Everyone else was ‘my wife, my brother, someone at work. Oh, I’d heard about it from my brother-in-law, my next door neighbour’ and there was a big viral effect of this where people who were, where people had talked about the item in the Matter box had acted as a stimulus for a conversation for them to have about Virgin Atlantic. And the feedback that came back from that was stupendous. And I mean people were talking about it amongst their friends and family and the whole thing kind of grew to have a life of its own.
The Matter audience is like a pool of kind of super-engaged, super-chatty, super-connected consumers and it’s a very, it’s a rare group that you probably couldn’t find anywhere else. They’re very digitally engaged, they’re very digitally sophisticated. They’re three times more active on social networking sites than the UK norm. They’re seven times more influential across their various interest groups than the UK norm.
This is the Nintendo Wii piece where people said, oh, I don’t like, I’m not interested in Nintendo but I know somebody who is, and it was a very simple idea.
It was just a, it was a wristband with a Wii logo on it. It told a beautifully simple story about Nintendo and it had nothing, there was no call to action on it and there was nothing further than that, but we discovered this behaviour through the research that we got from the pilot because people said, a lot of people responded through the research and they said, I’m not, Nintendo Wii is not a brand for me, I’m not interested to do it but I’ve given it to somebody who is interested.
And I think over 40% of the recipients answered in that way. And Rory Sutherland has since termed this behaviour as outsourced targeting, the idea that you can get one set of consumers to go and find your target market for you.
The original concept for Matter was that we were going to buy audiences commercially, much the same as everybody else does. And when we did the pilot we bought a male, 25 to 34, ABC1 audience because we thought that would be quite interesting to test against.
And we put, sort of as an afterthought we put the ability for people to join and get Matter box voluntarily because we thought that would, we thought a few marketing directors and kind of advertising wonks might volunteer to get that. But we didn’t think, there was no, never any idea that there would be any kind of widespread consumer demand. Why would consumers volunteer to be advertised to?
Within about two weeks we had 20,000 people had joined up to get Matter. So first of all, our idea about buying audiences, that got thrown out the window. And so then we were able to watch the type of people who were joining up largely by the type of blogs and sites that were writing about Matter.
And it made this very fascinating transition from the sort of marketing directors, advertising wonks through to, through the sort of earlier doctor types and through people who follow cool hunting sites and then it got on to quite widespread consumer platforms like Martin Lewis’ Money Saving Expert and that gave us a much bigger audience.
So what we have now is we have this unique kind of slither of the UK population that’s virtually perfectly representative socio economically. It’s quite skewed, it’s a very young audience, but most importantly is that the audience is defined by its behaviours more than who it is.