5 minutes with Adam McIntyre

Name: Adam McIntyre

Job title: Letters Specialist

Organisation: Royal Mail Group Ltd

How did you get your current job and how long have you worked there?

I was a business development manager for Royal Mail and I was recruited as a specialist for our new media business MarketReach in 2012. It was such an exciting concept at the time and our goals were to become the centre of excellence for mail and provide advertisers and agencies with the insight, expertise and knowledge needed to make mail and door drop as effective as possible.

What do you enjoy most in your role?

I think I have the best job in the world and my friends think so as well! I work with an amazing group of talented, bright, enthusiastic and supportive people that are more like friends than colleagues and I get involved with clients, agencies and mailing partners that are full of the same type of people. I get to talk to them about something that I love (mail) and how we can squeeze every bit of value out of a media channel that even now still has the power to deliver amazing results.

What do you think direct marketing / mail / print will look like a year from now?

I’m taking a real gamble here and putting myself up for ridicule, nothing new for me there so I’ll carry on with the fortune teller bit. I think it’s going to take time for the retail sector to bounce back if it ever can and this will have an impact on printed media and direct marketing, However, I’ve already seen charities move back into mail in a positive way since the collapse in cold donor acquisition due to GDPR a couple of years ago and this is great to see. Also, with the explosion in home shopping and more people staying at home working, we will see more of the e-tail sector switch on to the benefit of brochures, catalogues and printed CRM. So, as we go through the year I can see our industry recover and grow.

Once lockdown continues to ease, the world as we know it will still be a very different place. What do you think the biggest positive change will be once this is all over?

I hope that the invisible heroes of this crisis, the essential workers particularly in the NHS are continued to be recognised and rewarded for what they have done and the sacrifices they have made. I hope that the politics of division and intolerance that has been so much on the rise in the last few years is replaced with this new spirit of caring and being interested in the well being of each other just a little bit more.

What is the most memorable direct mail campaign you can think of?

There are so many, People's Postcode Lottery’s first player acquisition mailing was memorable because there was so much at stake and look at them now?

Royal Mail sent an A4 “Chocolate!” letter to 4,000 of the client marketing and agency leaders in the UK as part of one of our campaigns that is still talked about now, and I had a real disaster once with the launch of the Heinz Amoy soy sauce. They mailed a one piece mailer that had a double digit coupon redemption, absolutely brilliant response, but the return address was the Heinz head office and 20 bags of undeliverable mail was blocking the managing directors parking space a week after the mailing! They wouldn’t believe the mailing was a success.

But the one I still think was great was the Macallan sock mailing, when they sent a letter with a pair of cheap socks enclosed that said “if you don’t tell them you want the Macallan you’ll get these again!” 58% redemption on a £1 coupon. Wow!

If you would like to know more about Adam or how we can help you with your print and direct mail, please get in touch.