Matter Matters

A couple of days ago I met Tim Milne, who runs Artomatic. That name may be familiar to some as the London based design staple. It functioned as a design consultancy and design emporium and print shop. Artomatic closed it’s shop doors a few years ago but returns this year as a strategic/production hybrid. I was keen to talk to him about his new project Matter.

So Tim, in a nutshell what is Matter?
Matter is a physical advertising brand channel or brand experience channel. People who take part will receive a (Matter) box in the post, which will contain a number of objects.

Each object is there to trigger some kind of emotional response connecting the recipient to a memory or an imagined scenario of the brand or experience.

How is this different from Direct Mail?
Well, with a lot of DM, people receive things such as mortgage offers when it’s time to renew their mortgage. They don’t ask for this and it relies on a company thinking they know when someone wants something. We believe people are more complex than that. Also, this is something that people will sign up for, so they are already curious and interested. And we hope that as they receive packages they’ll tell us how they interact with it so we learn what each person likes and dislikes making each package better than the one before.

We’d like the arrival of the Matter box to be something very pleasing for people.

What was your inspiration or thoughts behind this idea?
Fundamentally what we’re trying to do is to tap into that core fact that people like being given gifts. If you ask 100 people if they like being given things, 100 people are going to say yes.

We wanted to try and create indirect mail something that interrupted the direct process of DM.

It’s a brand experience channel. We hope that we might get people to act a little differently as a result of this communication. With DM it’s a very measurable response, often just a yes or a no. We’re looking at a much broader response from people, which will be harder to measure from some perspectives but should be a lot more interesting for people to engage with. We might not generate an action from every object we send out but if we don’t we might create a thought. And being in consciousness is what it’s all about.

So what sort of things will people receive if they sign up?
Well I don’t want to give too much away. I’m working with the agencies involved to create idea-based objects, things that are quite contextual and that inspire.

This sounds to me perhaps more along the line of ambient style advertising.
Very much so, that’s more the style of what we are trying to develop.

Have agencies and brands been fighting over box space?
Yes, some brands have tried to take the whole box or brand the outside of the box but none of this is going to happen. I’m curating Matter and so I’m holding tight onto the idea that Matter is the delivery for these brand items. We’re playing around with some interesting delivery ideas for the box as well.

You have a trial coming out in January. How will this work and who can take part?
Yes we’re doing a trial in January of 1000 users. Anyone can sign up on the Matter website. It’s first come first served and we’ll see what happens after that.

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If you work on brand based projects or in advertising I would think it‘s obvious why you need to sign up for this. This is a pretty interesting idea and whether you are for it or against it, you need to pay attention to what it does. I’m certainly very curious to see what I’m going to get…

Matterbox.co.uk

Comments

[Adam]

Very interesting. Lots of things to think about here!

[claire]

Thanks for the link - I couldn't find it anywhere when I read about this. Well done!

[Johnson]

Anyone found the secret party at stoli.com?