Rapp Collins epft tuvoojoh xpsl. That’s “does stunning work” in case you didn’t quite decipher that.

It ran a double spread ad with 53 names of ad people –scrambled. The only way to unscramble the names that turned out to be one Matt Jacobs, Nancy Vonk and Christian Barnett and others, was by looking at a web address at the bottom of the ad, and figuring out the letter substitution needed. The url itself was not the company address, but ‘greakfuckingplace.com’ which leads you to greatfnplace.com, which lets you type in a first name and last name to see a customized message.

Type a wrong name (you have to be pretty dumb to check if you’re not one of the 53 being poached) they allow you to contact them –basically apply for a job. But hey, this is Direct, so it’s no sin to ask directly, I suppose.

But in spite of the clever approach of going after creative officers and strat planners, and the trouble to encode their names, they do a poor job by making everyone of the 53 people being targeting see the same message –even traditional variable data printing does a better job of varying the fields and responses. But it does the job of driving traffic to the microsite, and maybe the main web site. Which justifies the expensive double spread in Advertising Age.

And speaking of Rapp Collins’ regular website it’s a tuvoojoh experience –unlike any other agency site I have seen.