Every now and then a project comes along that reminds you just how quickly marketing can move when everyone leans in. This one - working with a fintech looking to launch part of its product portfolio - was exactly that. What started as a positioning conversation turned into a full-blown international direct-mail campaign. Yes… direct mail. Stay with me.
The brief was simple: reposition an under-leveraged solution for a tighter ICP and launch it with enough impact to cut through a noisy market. Once we nailed the messaging, we went searching for a channel with real stopping power. Counterintuitively, the answer wasn’t “more digital.” It was zig-while-others-zag. So we resurrected a long-forgotten hero: the video pack.
Imagine opening what looks like a book, and a video springs to life the moment the cover lifts - no QR codes, no clicking, no faff. Just a beautifully produced story delivered straight to the desk of exactly the people we wanted to reach.
Of course, the client had a designer. But that was it. Everything else, from sourcing a production partner to creating a fulfilment workflow to building a follow-up machine, had to be stood up from scratch. Fast.
The supply chain became delightfully global. Production in China. Design in Ireland. My desk in the UK. Fulfilment in New York. A US-based follow-up team. And 2,000 contacts originally split across the UK and the US, eventually laser-focused on the States. Add in a voiceover artist (found, briefed and recorded entirely over Zoom, because… of course!) whose audio we synced into the final edit and suddenly we’d assembled a miniature UN of marketing suppliers.
Then came the data work: cleaning, matching, augmenting and segmenting the 2,000-strong list so our beautiful boxes didn’t end up with someone who left the company in 2019.
Six weeks later: assets created, packs produced (sustainably and with carbon offsetting), freighted across continents, warehoused in New York, dispatched across the US, and backed by coordinated email + phone follow-up - our first prospects were literally opening the box. And don’t worry, for you digital nerds we had a campaign across YouTube, web, email and LinkedIN too.
But the thing you don’t get with digital though - people noticed. They loved the mail. They raved how it was the best thing they’d seen in ages. They shared it with their colleagues. It made them feel something. That’s powerful.
The result? A healthy pipeline of prospective business.
Projects like this still blow my mind: global coordination, brand-new suppliers, complex logistics, creative production, data wrangling, cross-border regulations… all wrapped into a sprint that could’ve taken six months a few years ago.
But that’s the state of modern marketing: if you’ve got a clear message, a bold idea and the right partners, you can turn a spark into a market moment at remarkable speed.