Today’s thoughts about the mail

In the not-too-distant past I ordered tickets for RENT, the musical from the mid 1990s that’s on semi-perpetual tour and making its way back to Chicago again. Of course, all the large theaters in Chicago use Ticketmaster to handle ticketing – so I was charged for a variety of extra and excess fees, as I had expected:

• $9.65 – “convenience charge”
• $2.50 – “facility charge”
• $4.15 – “order processing charge”

and, of course, the

• $2.50 – “email you tickets instead of printing and mailing them ourselves, so you don’t cost us as much to service” charge

that I took a pass on. Why spend money just so that Ticketmaster can save some?

But I digress. I ordered these tickets, waited for a couple weeks and then the tickets showed up a few days ago. Well, not quite. An envelope with my receipt, accompanied by someone else’s tickets, arrived in my mailbox. Looks like a good ol’ fashioned printing facility error. Thankfully, nothing a little too much time on the phone couldn’t clear up. That is, after the 15 minutes it took to get the person on the other end to understand that I really did receive someone else’s tickets.

But this got me to thinking about transactional and especially about variable data printing. Variable data printing refers, in brief, to printing documents that are a combination of static, pre-built content and content that varies from document to document. Most of us will have seen examples in our mailboxes: those offers you and I receive which are tailored just to you and just to I, or at least just to people in your demographic and my demographic. Materials span from the barely personalized (credit card offers, for example) on through the gamut to highly personalized materials; these are usually saved for high-value purchases like weddings, to pitch former customers new cars after a few years, &c.

Most of the time, most of you and I just call it junk mail. The more personalized these mailings are, however, the more likely you and I are to respond to these. Some campaigns are even starting to tie-in with web advertising, magazine ads and other media. At this point in time, personalization and cross-media personalized campaigns still haven’t really taken off in a big, big way – but I foresee more and more of it in the next few years.

So, let’s say it’s a few years from now and I receive a personalized financial offer – for example, NewBroke Internet Brokerage may kindly send me an offer letting me know that I could move the $10,000 (for example) that’s in my brokerage account at JohnDoe, LLC to a new broker; because I average more than 10 trades a month, NewBroke will even give me $500 after 60 days with them. Now, let’s say that NewBroke sent out a number of these offers, all different: and let’s say that, like my RENT tickets above, I end up getting Johnny Unsuspecting’s offer. Thus I now know something rather curious about Johnny Unsuspecting: I have his offer saying he could transfer the $2,000,000 he has at OtherTrade Corp. to NewBroke. I now have some rather personal, and rather private, financial information about Johnny Unsuspecting.

Multiply this by the hundreds or thousands of mis-mailings that might occur before someone detects this. A mere mail mishap? Or a huge privacy violation and PR concern for NewBroke Internet Brokerage?

How about if this were a personalized offer to switch physicians instead? Or a personal mailing stating that I can get my chemotherapy 30% cheaper if I switch to a different lab? Now this isn’t just a privacy issue but (at least in the US) a HIPPA violation – and much closer to a criminal mistake.

Will personalized mailings become personalized enough that, if there’s a mailing mishap, they could release sensitive information? Enough to send a printing plant employee or supervisor to prison? Worse yet, enough to sink the company that contracted out their advertising campaign in bad press and litigation?