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Whilst this year’s Reader’s Digest prize draw direct mail pack may not win the ‘Most Creative Direct Mail Pack of the Year’ award, what you are looking at here could be the Mother of All DM packs.

The folks over at Reader’s Digest are masters of direct marketing. They’ve been doing direct mail for years; testing, refining, testing and refining, year in and year out. They analyse performance to the nth degree, looking at sales value, customer value, response data files, segment results and ROI from almost every imaginable perspective. They work out what delivers and do more, and they work out what doesn’t and do less.

So, what you see here is not down to chance. It’s based on knowledge. The envelope size, colour, markings of priority and response deadlines you see here are all devices that have earned the right to be there, they are all devices that work to generate the highest possible sales per £ spent.

Given its lack of creative credentials, this pack throws open the doors to the debate about creativity versus performance. Whilst most agency creatives want to win awards to stack on their office shelves, the business managers who are their clients want results. And it looks as though the masters of DM think this is the right route to the best ROI result.

One of the challenges facing direct marketers in the digital age is to think more responsibly about the environment. A core part of this responsibility will be to ensure that where a medium like direct mail is used, it is used as efficiently as possible. If your business needs 1,000 responses, it’s much better to generate that from 5,000 packs as opposed to 50,000 packs. That means improving response rates.

So here’s a question for all marketers buying direct mail creative: How many of the direct mail packs your agency have presented recently look anything like this?