Background

When the New Zealand All Blacks won the Rugby World Cup in November 2011, it created some pretty memorable newspaper front pages in New Zealand. But what about the thousands of Kiwis who lived thousands of miles away, how could they share in the afterglow of the World Cup victory?

Idea

Special Group – on behalf of the Newspaper Publishers Association – created a full page ad. which encouraged readers to turn it into a mailing.

All they had to do was fold up the newspaper, pop a message on it with a few stamps and post it to a Kiwi overseas so he or she could share the experience of holding and reading these special newspapers as if they were back home.

Results

Because of the varying sizes of the folded newspapers they couldn’t be electronically counted, so exact figures are impossible to know. But many of the major post office sorting houses returned figures of hand-counted newspapers from which it is estimated that well over 1,000 newspapers got mailed to mates and relatives overseas.

That is a lot of personalised DM that people paid for themselves to send around the world on behalf of the Newspapers Publishers’ Association.

From feedback and returned photos, there was evidence newspapers not only reached Australia, the UK and the USA but a fair few ended up in France. Where they would have been much appreciated.

Comment

One of the benefits of the digital revolution is that agencies are now teeming with creeks – creative geeks. A lot of these people are innovators. They write code, create apps, construct platforms and find new ways of bringing brands and people together.

They are influencing traditional advertising art directors and writers to think the same way. So, finally, after fifty years of stasis, press is suddenly beginning to get interesting. As well as augmented reality and QR codes to play with, the medium itself is opening up to the inventive mind.

What’s great about this is it’s a metamorphosis idea where print turns into Mail. Directory tried this in Cannes two years ago, turning a poster into a mailing. There were just 10 responses. This got over a thousand! It’s experiential, it’s ambient, it’s outdoor, it’s a clever media idea and it’s direct. It’s going to cost Special Group a fortune if they enter it into every category it could win awards in.