Tag: direct marketing

BMW Christmas Safety Card

To wish customers a new year of safe driving, BMW, together with ad agency AIR and electronics company Selectron, creates a Christmas card meant to be hung in the car.

A micro-sensor is built into the card to measure driving behaviour and react with a spoken message, “Ho! Ho! Hooo! Just like Santa!”, when the car is driven unsafely. The sensor measures G-forces and reacts when the car accelerates too much, or when it brakes or drives too quickly through bends.

A Christmas card that behaves like a safety co-driver

This is not a decorative greeting. The card acts like a lightweight in-car safety layer. It listens for aggressive driving signals, then interrupts with a playful warning that is hard to ignore.

Why this fits the BMW M League audience

These limited-edition cards are sent to members of the BMW M League who recently buy their car and participate in the BMW Track Days. For that audience, performance driving is part of the identity. This card nudges safer habits without lecturing, because it speaks in a tone that feels seasonal and disarming.

The pattern to steal

  • Pick a behaviour you want to influence and measure it directly.
  • Embed the intervention into a physical object people will actually place in the environment.
  • Trigger feedback at the exact moment of behaviour, not later in an email or app.
  • Use a tone that makes the correction acceptable, so people do not reject it on instinct.

A few fast answers before you act

What is the BMW Christmas Safety Card?

A Christmas card designed to hang in a car, with a built-in micro-sensor that detects unsafe driving and plays a Santa-style voice warning.

What does the sensor measure?

G-forces. It reacts to strong acceleration, hard braking, and taking bends too quickly.

Who receives these cards?

Members of the BMW M League who recently buy their car and participate in the BMW Track Days.

What is the core idea in one line?

Turn a seasonal greeting into an in-car behavioural nudge that activates in the moment.

Coca-Cola: Santa’s Forgotten Letters

When childhood letters get answered years later

The city of Santa Claus is situated in the state of Indiana, USA. The museum in the city brings together different objects related to Santa Claus and has long received letters from people around the world, described as doing so for more than 70 years.

Coca-Cola with its ad agency Ogilvy Brazil selected 75 forgotten letters and set out on an impossible task to find the writers and give them exactly what they asked for. The result was a touching movie that reinforces the magic of Christmas.

The impossible brief behind the film

The mechanism is straightforward and brutal in effort. Find a place where old letters to Santa were kept. Read through decades of messages that never got a reply. Select a small set of letters. Then track down the original writers and recreate the exact gifts they once requested.

“Forgotten letters” here means letters that were written to Santa as children, then stored and left unanswered for years.

In global FMCG holiday marketing, the fastest route to belief is to make generosity observable in the real world, not just promised in a tagline.

Santa’s Forgotten Letters is a Coca-Cola Christmas campaign by Ogilvy Brazil that turns archival letters into real deliveries, using the act of fulfillment as the proof of the story.

Why it lands: belief becomes physical

This works because it reverses the usual Christmas-ad formula. Instead of asking the audience to feel something while watching a film, it shows a real-world action first. The emotion is earned by the logistics.

The letters also do the writing for the brand. Each request is specific, personal, and time-stamped by childhood. That specificity makes the surprise feel less like marketing and more like closure.

The business intent hiding inside the sentiment

Coca-Cola is reinforcing a familiar role in the season. It wants to be the brand that protects the “magic” adults quietly miss, and it does that by staging a story people retell without needing to mention product features.

This is brand meaning built through a single, high-signal act that generates a long tail of earned conversation.

What to steal if you want emotion without manipulation

  • Start with an artifact, not an insight. Real letters, real handwriting, real specificity.
  • Make the work visible. Show the searching, the tracking, the making, the delivery.
  • Let the recipients carry the truth. The reactions are the credibility layer.
  • Limit the scope to protect authenticity. A small number of deliveries can feel more believable than a mass stunt.

A few fast answers before you act

What is Coca-Cola’s Santa’s Forgotten Letters campaign?

It is a Christmas film built around a real-world stunt: Coca-Cola and Ogilvy Brazil selected 75 old letters to Santa from Santa Claus, Indiana, tracked down the writers, and delivered the gifts they once asked for.

Why does the “old letters” device work so well?

Because it provides built-in authenticity and specificity. A handwritten childhood request feels personal and irrefutable, which makes the fulfillment feel earned rather than manufactured.

What should brands learn from the execution?

If you want belief, make the action do the persuading. Put the effort on-screen, keep the promise simple, and let real reactions confirm the story.

Mercedes-Benz Sprinter applies for a job

In order to get more companies to buy the Mercedes-Benz Sprinter, German ad agency Lukas Lindemann Rosinski actually got the Sprinter to apply for a job. To do this, they came up with the world’s first printing tyre. This enabled the Sprinter to write its own letters of application, all on its own.

Why this direct marketing idea lands

The power is in the role reversal. Instead of telling fleet managers that the Sprinter is a hard worker, the campaign makes the vehicle behave like one. It “applies”. It shows initiative. And it creates something physical that naturally gets noticed on a manager’s desk.

What makes the execution feel credible

The printing tyre is not a metaphor. It is the proof. It turns the van into the production tool, which makes the claim harder to ignore. If the Sprinter can literally produce its own application letter, it signals capability without relying on copy.

What to borrow for B2B marketing

  • Make the product do the talking. Let capability show up as a concrete action.
  • Put the idea into the buyer’s workflow. A real letter in a real office beats another brochure.
  • Design for “desk gravity”. If it looks like it belongs in the process, it is harder to dismiss.

A few fast answers before you act

What did Mercedes-Benz do here?
They had a Mercedes-Benz Sprinter “apply for a job” to companies as a way to drive interest and consideration.

Who created the campaign?
German ad agency Lukas Lindemann Rosinski.

What was the core mechanic?
A custom “printing tyre” that enabled the Sprinter to write its own letters of application.

Why is it effective as direct marketing?
Because it delivers a physical artifact into a business context, and the product itself is the proof of the idea.

What is the main lesson for B2B campaigns?
Convert product benefit into a behavior that buyers can witness, not just read about.