The butterfly, the shirt and what paper taught me about direct mail
By Rich Boland
There’s a particular kind of weirdness that lives inside a direct marketing agency. The good kind, mind. But still a bit weird. The kind where the art director and writer sit down with the team and say, “what if we made a shirt out of paper?” and everyone leans in and says “…go on.”
In a previous life I spent a few years running Publicis Dialog BNE, the below-the-line arm of Publicis Mojo. We were the little sister agency. The scrappy insurgent. Anyhoo, this isn’t about an agency’s approach to creative awards. It’s about paper, direct mail, and how the things that work in advertising still work in direct mail. Obviously.
The brief: convince the people who make direct mail to use better paper
One of the most enjoyable chapters of that time came from a couple of briefs. Given to us by CPI Group, the paper importers who had just brought in some amazing new stocks from GMUND.
In 2011 they joined BJ Ball Papers. But back then, they were the big paper merchant wanting to out-creative the likes of Spicers and Doggetts. CPI could have approached a bigger, more famous creative agency. Instead, they gave us the chance to help them stand out, and we were ever so grateful for it.
The challenge was a particular one. How do you convince creatives, production directors and the broader print industry to use new paper stocks? Not just for brochures, collateral, annual reports and the like. But for direct mail marketing where it needs to cut through and work hard to persuade.
The target audience was, in a word… difficult. Creatives are a particular breed. They’ll happily spend a Tuesday debating typeface kerning for an hour. But ask them to get their timesheets up to date, and they’ll run for the kills. Anyway, the audience was the very people who make the work happen. The team we had on it were Nick Pritchard (art director and all-round paper genius) and Sandra Hind (smart-as-a-whip writer).
Reaction: the stock that flew
The first cab off the rank was Reaction. A metallic-effect paper stock built to run through laser machines cleanly. No efficiency losses. No finish degradation. None of the things that typically made metallic papers a production director’s nightmare.
A beautiful, ever-so-shiny stock. But beauty doesn’t sell itself and certainly not to a room full of people who’ve been burned by a metallic that flaked, fogged, jammed mid-run and cost thousands to put right.
So we made a book. Not just any book, mind. A book made entirely of the stock, with every finish and embellishment you could think of, in all the stock weights. What I found particularly satisfying was the “record sleeve”. When you opened the book, a butterfly made of paper, wire and elastic bands fluttered out. The team went full MacGyver on it.
We produced every element of the pack on Reaction stock, and that showed exactly what the paper could do: the sheen, the crispness, the laser-finished text sitting perfectly on a metallic surface with zero compromise. The butterfly wasn’t just whimsy. It was proof of the name. Simples.
Well, nothing in this was simple. But watching creatives, producers, printers and finishers throw themselves at it was very rewarding. For a time we were the guys who sent “…that Butterfly-pack…”, which made us feel very proud. It won tonnes of production, creative and effectiveness awards, which it deserved to. Not only did the creative team and agency get noticed, but CPI Group and their wonderful paper earned the acclaim they richly deserved. And a paper stock that provokes a reaction? That’s a stock a creative will happily spec and ask their production team to create a direct mail pack with.
A cotton-like stock
For our cotton-like stock launch, we went a different direction. The logic was similar, though. The cotton paper had a tactile quality that practically whispers “quality” the moment you touch it. The texture. The weight in the hand. The way it makes whatever’s printed on it feel like it matters.
But how do you show a production director how a cotton-like stock behaves in a way they’ll actually remember? You engineer a shirt of course.
We constructed, editioned and monogrammed shirts and shirt boxes from the stock. Folded. Packaged. Delivered. The moment someone opened that box, they didn’t need a brochure explaining the stock’s properties. They felt it. They held it. Then they showed someone else in the office. And that’s the whole game, isn’t it? Getting your audience to engage with your message and then share it. Oh, and after a few hours of Googling I found the stock available from the team at Ball & Doggett.
What paper taught me about direct mail
Both campaigns were fun to make. But they worked for reasons that have nothing to do with butterflies or shirt boxes and everything to do with what makes direct mail effective, whatever decade you’re operating in:
- Different gets noticed. In a world of flat, forgettable communications, dimensional and tactile mail stands out. Something with physical dimension, unexpected weight, or a texture that demands to be touched wins attention before anyone reads a single word. Today, with the average person swimming in noise, that physical presence is invaluable.
- Be persuasive. We didn’t tell creatives that Reaction was a great metallic stock. We showed them, by making them hold the evidence. The best direct mail has always worked this way. Experiences are unforgettable.
- Empathy matters. This is the one that gets overlooked. The butterfly. The shirt. These weren’t just clever executions they were acts of generosity. They said: we thought about you, and we made something worth your time. That’s what separates direct mail that converts from direct mail that gets binned. When a piece of mail feels like it was made for a person rather than fired into a database, people respond differently. They keep it. They think about it. They feel something. They do something.
The same principles, a different decade
I’m telling you this story not because I’m nostalgic for the agency days. Well, I am a little bit. But mostly because these principles are alive and well today. Digital marketing is extraordinary at scale and targeting. It’s less extraordinary at sitting on a kitchen bench for seventeen days. At being passed around an office. At arriving in the letterbox like a small, considered gift.
Combine the physical presence and trust of direct mail with the precision and reach of digital channels, and you’re not choosing between old-school and new-school. You’re stacking the best of both. The butterfly still flies. The shirt still gets opened. The medium still matters, especially when it’s thoughtful enough.
Talk to us about your next direct mail campaign
Precision Group helps people create unforgettable direct mail. If you’ve got a campaign that needs to land with weight and earn a response, talk to our client services team about paper stocks, formats and finishes. Email info@thepg.com.au, or visit thepg.com.au/services/mail to learn more.
