The Power of Video Direct Mail as an opportunity for luxury brands

Continual technological advances and mass production capabilities now allow the commercial application of flat micro LCD screens to be embedded into Print Media. This is enabling corporations to seriously consider incorporating this new innovation into key budget expenditure. Advances in data and customer profiling have also made it easier for brands to better identify their target customers and send their video advertisements directly to those most desired and hardest to reach clients in a manner that both attracts their attention and is highly viral i.e. customers are inclined to show off this innovative technology within their own social groups thus creating an even wider reach from a single piece of direct mail.

Direct mail may be contracting due to the expansion of email marketing, but video in direct mail may buck this trend, particularly for high value goods and services. And in terms of price? A recent successful campaign for Land Rover was carried out by Wonderman using traditional direct mail (i.e. without the use of video) at a cost of $90 per unit shipped to customer. So video cards – at about half the cost - would compete well with this. And don’t forget, even allowing for contraction, the predicted spend in the US alone for 2012 is set at $29.8 billion on traditional Direct Mail

So we are not talking about a small market here.

Among the biggest users of direct mail - Financial Services, FMCG, Automotive, Telecommunications, Retail, Travel and Home Shopping – there are plenty of opportunities for using video to promote high value goods. And with the increase in popularity of social media, luxury brands, which have traditionally viewed above-the-line advertising as a better route to market, are increasing their use of direct mail as a starting point for dialogue with target customers, to encourage further conversations through social media and community sites such as Facebook as well as their own websites.