I have noticed an epidemic of letters, articles and features
written by marketing folk from both sides of the fence (client and
agency) marvelling at the fact that they have been misidentified by
direct mail. ’They thought I was a mum,’ announced one portly male from
a direct marketing agency.
’They called me John, not Jonathan,’ said another. The latter wrote a
letter of such a revelatory nature that both Marketing and Marketing
Week published it.
And the news is? No news. If the exercise is a clever ruse to reassure
the public that this sort of occurrence is rare, we are not fooled. If
it is to register their outrage that people of such importance are
mis-targeted, then they’ve failed there too - I’d never heard of them
anyway.
Just stop it! We are all out there receiving misdirected information
every day. My name is wrong more often than not and, if that wasn’t bad
enough, the contents are virtually always of no interest to me. I
receive too much of it, day after day after day. Everybody does. Do we
all write to the papers whenever a mailshot arrives at our sixth-floor
flat offering a conservatory? Do we turn to each other and say ’Good
golly, I must have been mistargeted? No, we leave them on the hall table
for months before binning them. ’And the news today ... the sun is going
to rise in the East ... probably.’
Perhaps the greatest insult of all is that the letter which was
published in two such august publications was from a marketing man at a
building society. If I complained every time that one of that lot sent
me something that was misdirected, I’d never get any rest.
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