Creative Effectiveness in door drop - examples from 2018

Written by Mark Davies, Managing Director of Whistl and member of the Door Drop Hub and Print Council.

Challenging expectations of door drop

One of the perennial challenges of working in the door drop industry is that you come across brands who, if they think of us at all, harbour a perception of the channel that it is only fit for down-market brands targeting down-market households. At its most fundamental level, door drops target households and uniquely we can reach almost every single one of the nation’s roughly 28 million residential homes. That means we have equal reach across all demographics and the channel is truly democratically accessible by all.

I thought of this challenge when I received the recent door drop from P&O Cruises. A well-designed, well-produced 12-page mini-brochure advertising a range of cruise holidays with prices starting from £249 per person up to more extravagant adventures with entry pricing from £1,999 per passenger. That’s a nice brand to be using our channel, I thought, and I filed it alongside creative from Waitrose, Kuoni, The White Company, Ocado and Abel & Cole to produce the next time I met a ‘sniffy’ marketer who felt that door drops weren’t really “their brand”!

The industry has worked very hard in recent years to shed the negative images of old and reinvent itself as a data-led, highly targeted, accountable performance channel that drives sales and new customer acquisition both online and offline. And in that context, the P&O entry is a very laudable example.

The creative distillation of my years working in this industry is that if the item can say in two seconds flat who it is from and what’s in it for me then it is on the road to success. This item was well-branded, tied into their above-the-line advertising featuring Rob Brydon and featured a clear call to action indicating I could get free, onboard credit and book for a minimal 5% deposit. Importantly it was printed on a good quality stock communicating P&O’s brand values almost subliminally. A lot of recent research has focused on the way that print conveys trust far better than other marketing channels and the investment that P&O had made in this door drop will I’m confident create a value exchange for the target consumer that makes this activity pay back.

If you think your door drop campaign successfully highlights door drop marketing then get your entries ready for the DMA Awards 2018 Door Drop Category - entries open 2 July 2018.