We feel toward serial mailings the way most people feel toward serial killers. However, unlike serial killers, serial mailings are sometimes amusing. McCann Relationship Marketing’s campaign for the GMC Envoy falls into that category.
Making the campaign interesting as well as amusing was the marketing problem executive creative director Richard Eber was asked to solve. GMC wanted the n ame of the truck played up so consumers would ask for it by name. And at the same time he had to try to keep them from buying another truck until the Envoy hit the showrooms.
The creative team developed a series of narrative letters about two brothers. One, Eber claims, was based on the client, the other spun off from the name of the truck. No one, Eber maintains, knows exactly what the envoy is or does, but “it sounds intriguing.”
(An envoy is a diplomat whose rank is just below that of ambassador, or a messenger on a diplomatic mission.)
The seven-part series is plotted so that three letters are positioned as communiques sent by the envoy as he drives around Europe during his travels. The letters are sent directly to the prospects, not by diplomatic pouch but from Europe, complete with foreign stamps and cancellations. A typical letter will include some adventure in which some feature of the truck is discovered or used.
Another letter, this one from the brother in Detroit, will then describe what it is about that feature that made it useful in the envoy’s adventures. Eber likens the difference between the brothers as right brain/left brain. (A sister, who turns up in one adventure, is the connective tissue between the two, we assume.) As an example, Eber cites the envoy traveling through some mountains in a storm and using the headlights. The other brother then explains what it was about the headlights that made them so useful.
The adventures of the envoy, Andrew Bank, and his brother, Steven, begin with a letter from Steven in response to a request for information about the Envoy. It sets the stage for the series of letters and includes a form to be completed and returned by the consumer to find out how interested in a truck he or she is. Enclosures include photos of Andrew and Steven and the truck being unloaded from a container. There’s a sweepstakes offer and a chart comparing the envoy’s stats to the Envoy’s stats.
The next letter is from Andrew, relating his adventures in Greece. There’s another photo and the first of what Eber calls “chachkas”-in this case, a menu from a restaurant Andrew allegedly dined in.
Steven provides the next letter, which includes a book of postcards of some of the trucks GMC has produced over the last 95 years. Andrew then writes from the Hotel Vermeer in the Netherlands. He subsequently turns up in London, driving the Envoy to some sort of state dinner with an accompanying photograph to prove it. The last letter is from Steven and both Envoys are now stateside for sister Melissa’s wedding in Nantucket.
Eber claims a 12% response rate, with answers from a questionnaire providing smaller and increasingly qualified lists. Since the Envoy had just made it to the showrooms at press time, it’s obviously too soon to tell the conversion rate.
Although Eber likes to go on about the project having McCann’s best writers-one a published author with a book contract and the other “just as good”-what we have here is closer to a sitcom than a serialized novel. To use E.M. Forster’s distinction, the characters are flat, not round, and have a specific but limited set of characteristics. The characters react predictably, but not uninterestingly, to any situation in which the writers put them. The more specific and well thought out the characterizations are, the more longevity they have.
This is what makes the Banks boys work. They are the Frasier and Niles Crane of direct mail.
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