Welcome to Directory 24

The end of our sixth year.

And there is some fabulous work for you to look at and learn from.

Much of it was on show at the Cannes Festival of Creativity, back in late June.

If it seems odd to be reading about it now, ten weeks later, we offer no apologies.

Cannes this year was bigger than ever and it has taken a couple of months to look at most of the 1,004 winners and to try to make sense of some of the themes that emerged.

We’ve given it a go and on pages 5-24 you can read our version of events. We’ve tried to identify the trends and give some idea of how the future is taking shape for both agencies and marketers.

However, while technology and innovation dominated the major awards, at Directory we are always keen to remind everyone that all these new platforms are not instead of traditional media but as well as.

A plug for mail

So we have put together a showcase of some of the best mail ideas to win Lions and get short-listed in Direct.

Interestingly, only a couple of these come from specialist Direct agencies.

Is mail coming out of the shadows and finding itself incorporated in the mix of well-planned integrated campaigns?

Royal Mail will be hoping that this is the case in the UK, especially with the launch of MarketReach in July.

This is a brave new attempt to entice top advertisers to add mail to the mix as part of their integrated campaigns.

The enticing part of it all is the start-to-finish service they can now offer marketers who need their hands held.

MarketReach will do the lot. Crunch the data, identify the target audience(s), devise a strategy, come up with the creative, produce it, post it and measure the results.

Thank you Tim, Danielle and Brenda

We are big fans of Royal Mail here at Directory Towers.

Partly because we genuinely love mail as a medium and use it the whole time to recruit new subscribers and hang on to our existing ones. (Thank you, by the way, all of you who have renewed your subscriptions recently and/or are just about to!) Partly because without MarketReach sponsorship, Directory would struggle. 

So we’d like to take this opportunity to thank Tim Hamill, Head of Intelligence and Planning at MarketReach, for his support in the last year. Thanks also are due to Danielle Homan and Brenda Henderson, who have been wonderful clients.

Thank you Dannos

Though based in the UK, Directory attracts contributors and subscribers from all parts of the globe.

If the UK economy is jittery at the moment, then elsewhere in Europe the outlook is seriously bleak, particularly in Greece.

We are delighted that journalist, blogger and conference organiser par excellence Dannos Tsakalos has given us the Hellenic view of Direct Marketing on pages 25 - 29.

What we have found inspiring is how optimistic Dannos is about the future. As the French poet Apollinaire once wrote, “Joy follows after pain; how violent hope is nobody knows.”

Here’s hoping, violently, that the Eurozone crisis is resolved sooner rather than later and that Greece’s shocking unemployment figures start to shrink.

Thank you for reading

Lastly, thank you for your interest in Directory, whether you’re a casual reader who has just picked this up in reception, or whether you’re a dedicated subscriber.

If you have contributed to this issue, thank you for sending us your work. And if you sent us something and it didn’t make the cut, thank you for taking rejection on the chin.

Please don’t stop sending us the campaigns you are proud of.

It is only by sharing the best with each other that we can raise creative standards and prove to our clients that great ideas always lead to great results.