Direct Mail · Retouching · Print
BMW
An embedded-video-screen mailer for the 7 Series — and the retouching standard behind BMW’s marketing imagery.
Overview
- Discipline
- Direct Mail · Retouching · Print
- Role
- Design & production
BMW’s 7 Series team needed a new way to put the car in a prospect’s hands before they ever reached a showroom. The brief was open: find a direct-mail format worth opening, and worth keeping.
That answer was a mailer built around an embedded video screen, with printed cards staged so the vehicle’s new features reveal themselves as the piece is handled. But the engagement ran wider than one object: it also covered the image retouching behind BMW’s marketing, promotional, and social materials — the everyday imagery the brand puts in front of people, finished to the same standard as the car.
The Format
A direct-mail piece competes with the recycling bin. Embedding a working video screen — rather than printing another fold-out — was a bet that a 7 Series prospect would stop for something that behaved like an object, not a brochure.
The printed cards were staged around the screen so the vehicle’s features unfolded in sequence as the recipient moved through the piece. Format, trim, fold, and screen placement were resolved together, the piece always considered as it would feel in the hand.
Retouching
Automotive photography never arrives press-ready. Across BMW’s marketing, promotional, and social imagery, each shot was retouched in post — paint response, panel geometry, reflections, ambient light — so the finished image holds against the brand’s own production standard, at the resolution large-format work demands.
The work moved between studio and environmental frames, and between channels and formats, but the discipline stayed the same: keep every image consistent with BMW’s established visual language, and let nothing pull the eye from the vehicle.
Gallery
Outcome
Two sides of one standard — a mailer resolved as a single object, and a body of retouched imagery running across BMW’s channels, each finished to the level the 7 Series is sold on.