Wildwood's wild cards build identity, help sell special events

Nation's Restaurant News, Feb 23, 1998 by Alan Liddle

PORTLAND, Ore. -- In a fusion of new technologies and old marketing strategies, Wildwood Restaurant & Bar here has taken to creating direct-mail postcards with a visual twist.

The contemporary regional American restaurant's latest holiday greetings card pictured the entire staff playing on a teeter-totter assembled from a monstrously large pear and spoon.

The prior-year executive chef and operating partner Cory Schreiber and chef de cuisine Krista Anderson were shown in one-eighth scale frolicking among the plates and silver on a Wildwood tabletop -- all the while being watched by a plastic goose sporting a holiday party hat.

Schreiber, explaining why he has enlisted the help of longtime friend and photographer Michael Mathers to create promotional fantasy postcards, says: "The photo is more important than the words on the back: Whether or not people keep them [postcards] is determined by the image."

Getting people to keep a postcard is key to getting them to read whatever written information is included on the back, hence Schreiber's interest in a graphically "grabby" package. The retention rate among viewers of this year's card appears to have been pretty good, he adds, as a winemaker dinner event promoted on the back sold out.

Schreiber seems to be only half joking when he quips that his ultimate goal for the postcards is to "go into people's homes and see them attached with magnets to the refrigerator door."

The chef says he used little conventional newspaper or magazine advertising last year because he believes that approach works better for "products that can be found on a shelf" at multiple locations than it does for an independent restaurant. He says he most likely will continue following a promotional strategy that combines community service with direct-mail delivery of the restaurants quirky postcards.

"If you look at my profit-and-loss statement, under `advertising' the only expenditures you'll see are for these [postcards] and matches."

Photographer Mathers is a professional with books of architectural images under his belt, among other achievements. He created Wildwood's wild cards by photographing the employees and other objects at the restaurant, using a conventional camera and film. Back at his studio in Astoria, Ore., he scans the film negatives into an Apple Macintosh personal computer running Adobe Photoshop software, which he uses to marry the disparate graphical elements and strategically add color to the mostly black-and-white images.

To some observers, the Internet might seem a natural medium for the sort of computer-aided graphical wizardry Mathers performs for Wildwood. Schreiber, however, believes he is getting more bang for his buck by using such work as a component of direct mail, which he can deliver to as broad or narrow a target market as he desires. "Right now," he acknowledges, "I'm not getting heavy hits" at the restaurant's web site: (http://katu.citysearch.com/E/V /PDXOR/0007/24/22/1.html)

The Portland operator is not alone in utilizing the latest in computer and graphic-arts technologies to forge eye-catching images for postcards and other direct-mail pieces. Chef-owner Bradley Jones of Carmel, Calif., had Central Coast residents doing double takes last year when they came across a card that capitalized on the restaurateur's name and Harrison Ford-like looks to portray him as a heroic figure along the lines of fictitious professor-turned explorer Indiana Jones.

Regardless of whether the choice is conventional or computer-enhanced images, restaurateurs and other small business owners interested in postcard marketing are benefiting from a new breed of "small-run" printing companies, such as Modern Postcard of Carlsbad, Calif.

"Most printers require that you purchase 5,000 or more postcards, or if they do short runs, they charge substantially higher prices," Modern's marketing coordinator, Amanda Churchill, says. "We're unique in that we offer such a short run [a 500-card minimum order] for $95."

To help keep prices down, Modern uses its Internet web site [www.modernpostcard.com] to spell out which file formats it will accept for printing jobs and how users should package and submit all relevant materials. If directions are followed properly, turnaround is two to three weeks, Churchill says. The preferred file format is Acrobat .PDF, she adds, and as part of its service, her company will imprint a user's postal bulk-mailing stamp on each card.

Schreiber, who went with an oversized postcard for his 1997-98 holiday greetings, paid Modern $285 for 1,000 of the "bigger and better" cards. He says he paid an additional $380 for postage and compensated Mathers with an unspecified amount of meal credits.

Mathers, who lays out the postcards for Schreiber and mails the digital materials to Modern Postcard on an Iomega Zip-drive disk, says his cash fees for such a job might go as high as $1,500.