One agency that should definitely bite the crust

Marketing Week strives to bring you the best in marketing: the latest media developments, the most arresting creative work, the top customer-acquisition and retention techniques and so on.

The Diary, on the other hand, delights itself in bringing you news of the grubbiest, least effective and downright worst from the industry, and this tale of a client with a calculator is no exception.

Brian Hannan, of The Cookery School in Glasgow, is claiming the worst-ever response rate to a marketing campaign, and he may have a point. Hannan’s door-to-door mailshot to 43,500 upmarket homes in Glasgow, produced a total of… six responses. That’s 0.01 per cent. Ouch.

Mr Hannan is keen not to claim all the glory for this sparkling failure, however – a similar campaign, distributed through the Royal Mail, produced a (slightly) better 0.38 per cent response. Hannan feels that the door-drop distributor should share some of the credit. After all, none of the people he telephoned could recall receiving his brochure.

But the distributor is none-too-anxious to steal the limelight. It says its subcontractor has proved reliable in the past, and blames tenement-dwellers with communal letterboxes, notorious for ignoring mail-outs, on the crumby response rate.

Scots modesty aside, the Diary is genuinely impressed by this underachievement. Can you better (or worst) it?