USPS: Damn the trees

[Denver]

Really interesting ad I just saw on tv for the United States Postal Service.

The gist of the ad was:

"No one has ever hacked a refrigerator note. A virus has never attacked a cork board. Give your customers the confidence and security of a paper receipt. USPS."

I've heard of the USPS's financial struggles. Even in my state, they've been working out which offices to close.

But I hope that fighting the internet, and all those companies who are trying to save money by prompting their customers to go paperless, is not their best ad idea.

 

[hcmom]

A radio ad I heard the other day was basically "Screw targeted marketing, send your ads to everyone".

 

[Puppycow]

Three cheers for junk mail!

 

[Tacita]

We work with USPS a lot. They are firing people left and right. I was told that "our" carrier (the one devoted to our area), they were trying to fire. Trying to fire? I have no idea. All I know is that we ship out a ton of stuff and use them and they didn't help us. We call and say "we have 1,000 packages, can you come pick these up" and they say "sorry".

 

[hcmom]

It's pretty damn near impossible for a carrier to be fired.

But yeah, oddly, their thing is that they DELIVER mail, not pick it up.

 

[Tsukasa Buddha]

It's a bit better than "letters have a certain je ne sais quoi", but still really bad.

 

[The Don]

A radio ad I heard the other day was basically "Screw targeted marketing, send your ads to everyone".

In a previous life I had a lot to do with marketeers. One large FMCG company had invested millions of pounds in a state of the art (in the early 2000's) marketing application which allowed their customer base (millions of customers) to be segmented by a bewildering array of attributes and for each group of customers (cell) to receive a different piece of marketing over a multi-stage marketing campaign.

The idea was to absolutely target their message so that it would achieve maximum return for their marketing investment. It was quite a big deal because IIRC it cost around £3 per targeted person to send out the marketing pack.

After much thinking they decided that they would like to send it to 20,000 people that that these people should be (and I'm paraphrasing here) left handed first time mothers in their early 40's who had given birth between 12 and 18 months ago.

We did the analysis and found that there were precisely 3 people matching that profile. Instead of maybe rethinking either the campaign or their selection criteria the marketing "professionals" employed by this multi-billion company decided instead to add another 19,997 people women from their database at random.

My experience is that a lot or targeted marketing is bunkum.

Our accountant inadvertently had the least targeted marketing ever in human history. We engaged him after we found his card in the street outside our house.

 

[The Central Scrutinizer]

But I hope that fighting the internet, and all those companies who are trying to save money by prompting their customers to go paperless, is not their best ad idea.

It's their only choice. Other than cutting back and eventually closing down. Nobody wants to put themselves out of business, especially a government organiziation.

 

[Pup]

You can pretty much see how they thought up that campaign.

"Let's brainstorm. What are some reasons people don't like to send things over the internet?"

"Well, let's see, they're afraid of having their identity stolen."

"Perfect. Let's make up an ad campaign around that."

Ironically, I've seen ads just the opposite showing how identity thieves steal things from the trash and claiming that going paperless is safer.

 

[stevea]

Well the whole thing has been horribly managed and unresponsive to change for decades - no wonder the are in financial ruin.