Custom Junk Mail

I don’t usually find inspiration in junk mail but this postcard was an interesting mass customization artifact. It ties together 4 kinds of customization:

1. The card itself is printed using a process called variable data printing. It is a high speed process that gives quality results equal to what you would get with offset printing (the way most magazines are printed), but let’s you have different info/imagery on each piece. Hence this card has my name printed on it and embedded in the images.

2. It advertises print on demand clothing the t shirts and sweat shirts as well as…

3. CNC embroidery on the baseball cap. Instead of having to make thousands of one cap I can use a service like this one or the similar offering from Zazzle to have the hat customized with my name.

4. Finally there is a custom website they created for me (and the 20,400 others who share my surname) JustForFlaherty.com. This is an interesting ploy and feels like the earliest stages of Minority Report style advertising.

Though I could do without the tacky ethnic profiling I’m a huge fan of this kind of personalized advertising.

Tagged as: Advertising, Offset printing, Personalization, Printing, Products, Publishing and Printing, Variable Data Printing