Greetings

In the Netherlands, the National Post Service (TPG Post) launched a viral campaign to promote its online postcard service, while in Spain, the Sociedad Estatal Correos y Tel�grafos opened a tender to select the advertising agency to create a campaign for the online postal service.

To find out more about the TPG Post campaign, we talked to Jelle Kolleman, creative director at the Dutch agency Redurban, which developed the creative.

Martina Zavagno: TPG Post recently launched the marketing initiative to promote the online postcards service, where online-created postcards will be delivered in people's "real" mailbox. What was the objective behind the scenes?
Jelle Kolleman: Well, the campaign was made to increase web traffic to the renewed website of TPG Post, as well as letting people experience some online services that it facilitates. Such the real-card-service and finding postal codes.

Z: How does the viral campaign work, what is the creative idea?
JK: The idea behind the campaign is that we wanted to create a viral mechanism in which the products of TPG Post could play a role.

Z: How did you come up with the viral idea?
JK: The client wanted to experiment with cross-media marketing, so we tried to combine both print and web. TPG post already had this online service, which makes it possible to send a real, printed card from the net to the recipient's front door. Putting those things together, we came up with the idea of creating cards that make the recipients very curious as to who had sent the card. Because the sender's name is not on the card. The only way to find out the sender's name is to go online and fill in the unique card-code. On this website (www.watschrijfemenou.nl) we tried to change the receivers into senders, so the virulance continues.

Z: What was Red Urban role in developing the campaign?
JK: Redurban came up with the idea, and we tested the idea first on the client.
Before our presentation, we sent one crazy card to this person and told him, if he wanted to know who the sender was, to go online. At that point he realized that Redurban was the sender. We didn't have to sell the idea anymore, at that point. He was already convinced of the possible effect this campaign could have.