• by Amy Corr , Staff Writer, August 20, 2012

Direct mail may be customizable by household, but usually not to the extent of Toronto’s Pfaff Porsche campaign of 60 direct-mail pieces.

Sixty pieces might sound like a small number for a big city like Toronto, but not when it’s so well-targeted. Lowe Roche, Toronto, created the campaign, targeting homeowners in affluent neighborhoods in Toronto in a very special way. The agency would park a Porsche Carrera 911 S (price tag: $97,000) in a driveway, take a picture and print out a one-of-a-kind postcard delivered right to the homeowner’s mailbox. Next to the picture of a Porsche sitting in her driveway was copy stating: “It’s closer than you think.”

The postcard drove traffic to MakeThatPorscheMine.com, where postcard recipients could book a test drive with a Porsche of their choice. The dealership would bring the car to -- you guessed it -- the tester's house.

“On a per-unit basis, our personalized DM cost more,” said Simon Craig, a copywriter at Lowe Roche. “But it also generated a 32% response rate in an industry that often considers a 2% response a resounding success. Generally speaking, we had a smaller reach, but with far more visibility and overall success.”

Craig said the agency spent around 15 minutes at each house creating the postcard. The project was completed in 12 hours over a two-day period, after a practice run took place. “We took a day to troubleshoot the technical details, including the wireless delivery of the image to the computer, and the generator/battery power supply required to run our printer,” said Craig. “We wanted to show our target that if they were thinking about a dream car, they might not need to look any further than their own driveway.”

Pfaff Porsche is considering another drive with its customized direct-mail pieces by the end of summer, expanding to an additional 3,000 homes.