Direct Mail

     So for our next project we have to do a direct mail piece aimed at our fellow classmates. For those who don't know, direct mail marketing is more or less targeted marketing. It makes no sense for a company to spend thousands upon thousands of dollars to print out an ad campaign that'll only resonate with 25% of their receivers. So what they do instead is send their pieces to a select group or demographic. This could be region, income level, age or education level.

     The company I had my internship with, Plattform Advertising, was a fully in-house agency that specialized in direct mail marketing for many online and on site education institutions. They did all the commercials (where I spent my summer), all the designing, all the research and all the data entry within the same building. It was really quite fascinating to observer and in hindsight I probably would have appreciated it way more if I did my internship as opposed to the summer of my freshman year. Anyways, for our project we had to design a postcard flier for our fictional business/event and it had to be aimed to our peers.

     The cool little thing about direct marketing in todays society is that you can easily change parts of an ad depending on who the audience is. So that means that I can save time and money by building a layout, putting in the pictures I need, then telling the computer to load "picture x" under "parameter y". The best example of this would be my grand opening flier for my "new" video game bar "Reptar on Ice".
     For my mailer I decided to do a grand opening flyer to promote and highlight the bar. I decided to make my two polar demographics "casual" and "hardcore"gamers.

     Now most people think a gamer is a gamer is a gamer. This is furthest from the truth. Just like every social culture there are sub-cultures. There are cultures for genres of video games (first person shooter, real time strategy, massive multiplayer online games), for the different major video game systems (Xbox, Wii, Playstation, PC), how often you game and how much dedication you put into it (hardcore vs casual) and even within games themselves (player vs player, player(s) vs environment/computer) so to generalize all us gamers would be a huge oversight.

     The above pictures were the notes I wrote down while brainstorming both demographics. As you can see both sides are more or less opposites of each other. Most casual gamers will most likely have a home console like an xbox or wii. These are easy to hook up and they can do a little of everything, steam video, play music and games and connect to the internet. In reality, consoles are pre made PCs specifically for gaming. A hardcore gamer will most likely have a high-end of custom built PC. These things are investments and labors of love. Having hand built a computer myself I can't explain the feeling you get with you build up a whole PC, wire it up, then boot up it for the first time. I knew exactly what parts were going into my computer and I saved my money to buy each and every piece.

     Casual people will play more "mainstream" games that everybody and their mother knows, we're talking the Call of Duty and Halo type games. Everyone has heard of Mario and he's almost considered the poster-boy of video games itself. A family friendly plumber that has good times with everyone. Hardcore gamers will more than likely play games that aren't as well know. My two current obsessions are Team Fortress 2 (a first person shooter that's been out since 2007) and League of Legends (a multiplayer online battle arena game). These aren't as well known to the public but the following they have is dedicated and serious, there are people who do stat crunching just to know, down to the decimal, what items do what in a sense of the meta-game.

     A hardcore gamer will more often then not play video games a few hours a day while the casual plays a few days a week, in terms of social interaction, most hardcore gamers have a core group of friends and usual associate mainly within their circle. Casual people are casual so they more open to meeting strangers. This is a very important note in the sense of the bar. You're going to have people that come in to hang out with their friends only, you need to cater to them. You also have people that are coming in to play video games and meet new people. You have to cater to them too. I decided that the best way to catch the eye of these two groups is with brand recognition.

     Now first off let me get the copyright statement out of the way. The characters depicted are all properties of their respective creators and companies, however the shots I used were altered in a way that certain symbols and logos are distorted and/or gone. They were then redrawn by me and altered accordingly. The photos were either taken in-game by me or part of a press release photo to be used by the public. Since this is for a fictional bar and used for school I think fair use might be ok.

(Casual gamer back)

(Casual gamer front)

     For the casual group I went with some of the most current and recognizable characters within the whole video game industry. I chose a picture of Mario (the most recognizable video game character in the world), Marcus Fenix from the "Gears of War" series, The Mii characters from "Wii Spors", an Elite Convenant from the "Halo" franchise, and a soldier from the "Bad Company 2". Most casual gamers have played all of these games once or twice and can spot out the brand easily because of the amount of exposure and popularity these games have.

(hardcore gamer front)

(Hardcore Gamer back)

     For hardcore, I chose more promiment figures of the "underground" gaming culture (I use underground very loosely). Some of the more popular game, like I mentioned earlier are; League of Legends (represented by Heimerdinger), Team Fortress 2 (the engineer), Minecraft (minecraft "Steve"), Street Fighter (M. Bison), and the robots from "Portal 2".Within the more dedicated gaming community, theses characters are just as common as the ones shown in the "casual" flyer.

  So with the pictures, I used a method similar to the photoshop technique that Shepard Fariey used when he made the "HOPE" poster for the 2008, Obama presidential campaign. I changed the levels on the pictures then went through each one and turned them into vectors via illustrator. I took a background from the photos that were provided to use via our teacher and juice drops. The background has random white poxes that would perfect as frames. So I took my vectors and masked them into the frames.

       

      The text I used is a video game based font I found online at dafont.com and I decided to highlight different features for the two demographics. For casuals I used different daily specials to bring people in seeing as how it's a common way to advertise a bar, for the slogan, theyre also catered to demographic. Wii bowling is referenced because as a mainstream game almost everyone has play this game once. For the hardccore folks I referenced certain gaming events like raids and marathon nights.

The whole thing was processed via CMYK and pantome colors with a eighth inch bleed. and went through a quick revision before being finalized. I think this project was a good exercise on catering to your audience and doing the appropriate research. It can be hard to try and please two opposite and polarizing groups with the same ad. But I think if you can find the middle ground  of what they have in common, then start leaning to the left or the right, you can make something that will bring in two completely different groups for one common goal.