Saatchi & Saatchi just turned the “out of office” reply into ad space

If you’d expect good marketing inspiration to come from somewhere, you’d probably expect it to come from Saatchi & Saatchi. You wouldn’t necessarily associate them with guerilla marketing stunts however, which is what makes this micro marketing campaign even more impressive.

When its art director went on paternity leave, it decided to ditch the standard out of office, and instead sell it to a production company, to see if they could make some money for it. What better way for a company to get in front of the right people, than by appearing directly in their inbox without even trying? People who emailed the director while he was on paternity leave were greeted with this ad, which didn’t look like your normal out of office at all :

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They’ve now taken this concept even further, and set up a beta programme whereby people can sell their out of office reply to the highest bidder

Maximising your out of office

I love marketing like this takes the ordinary and completely turns it on its head. We’ve seen it done with website error pages for example, but there have also been some other great examples of using your out of office differently. Gary Vaynerchuck often uses a Youtube link in his out of office, sending a very different, personalised message to people that might not be able to reach him :

Have you seen any great examples of an out of office? We’d love to see them!