Postagram, the mobile app from Sincerely that lets you create and mail real-life postcards from your phone photos, has worked out a clever real-world integration with Bing for the Sundance film festival this weekend. A street team is wandering the snowy roads of Park City, Utah, taking photos of attendees, collecting their addresses, and mailing them Bing-sponsored postcards.
“Your mailbox has a few bills in it, and other boring stuff like that. The thing that’s going to stick out is when you get a card with pictures of you or your friends,” founder Matt Brezina explains. Especially if it’s a photo of you with your favorite actor. The Sundance Postagrams show the Bing sponsorship logo on the backing board for the photo, and include a link to get a free postcard courtesy of Microsoft’s search engine.
Sincerely’s main business model is still charging for the mail. Brezina isn’t sharing too much about these revenues, but he notes that the average person who sent Sincerely Ink holiday cards this past season spent $23 (each card costs at least $1.69). Sponsorships, meanwhile, are turning out to be an interesting secondary revenue stream. The Bing deal isn’t the first event that the company has done. The Kansas Speedway previously used it as part of a promotion at a NASCAR event, where fans could get photos taken with the cars, drivers, and trophies, then receive the branded mailings.
Brezina tells me that he’s been getting a lot of inbound inquiries from other companies around doing more things like this. Physical postcards may not be something that people will care about in the future as the world gets more and more digital, but right now they’re a key way to share and commemorate the good times, and that makes them a natural tie-in for event sponsorships.
More broadly, consider the Bing (and Kansas Speedway) deals as another indicator of large companies getting savvier about marketing to key audiences. Bing also has a Foursquare integration and a GroupMe setup to get people into its Bing Bar at Sundance. Facebook pages and Twitter accounts may be the bedrock of social media marketing today, but these other companies offer unique ways of reaching people, that cut out the noise from the larger services.