Royal Mail kicks off first major ad campaign for MarketReach to encourage mail marketing
The Royal Mail has lauched the first major ad campaign for its direct marketing services facility MarketReach as it looks to encourage brands to use both mail and email to communicate with consumers.
The MailMen campaign targets clients, media planning and buying agencies and combines digital, print, out of home (OOH) and direct mail. Featuring five industry executives, including MediaCom chief executive (CEO) Karen Blackett, the campaign promotes Royal Mail MarketReach’s 18-month research programme, The Private Life of Mail, which gives insight into the role of mail in people's homes and the impact this has on advertisers' ROI.
Speaking to The Drum Royal Mail MarketReach managing director, Jonathan Harman, said he hopes the campaign will trigger a "reappraisal of mail" across the industry.
"The idea really is to engage with the wider industry and seek a reappraisal of mail. We think we’ve got strong evidence that mail has a key role to play in the media ecosystem, but we didn’t want to bash people over the head with it. We didn't want to appear to be finger wagging [so] we thought we could do it in a more amusing and charming way."
The campaign includes promotional comments such as "Charming. Persuasive. Motivating. And for once I’m not talking about myself," by Robert Senior, Worldwide CEO, Saatchi & Saatchi Fallon Group and "On your 100th birthday, you’d be disappointed if the Queen only sent you an email," by Nik Roope, Founder, Poke.
Harman said that MarketReach has purposely shied away from any major activity "for a couple of years" as the Royal Mail wanted to build up a good track record of delivery as "a modern active media owner".
"I've been with the company two and a half years and we decided that we would not promote too deliberately while we were doing other things such as hiring talent to help improve the business and act more commercially.
"Once we started to make progress in those area we felt comfortable putting our head about the parapet and saying, you need to give mail another look."
Currently direct marketing accounts for 12 per cent of business at the Royal Mail, with revenues of over £1bn per year, which Harman said makes the postal service the" third largest media owner in the UK after Google and ITV". In the first six months of 2014 Royal Mail grew marketing mail revenue by five per cent, according to Harman.
The campaign was created by Publicis Chemistry. Financial details of which were not disclosed.
Earlier this month the Royal Mail partnered with design body D&AD to launch a range of initiatives to champion creative in direct mail.