Gotcha Gang Profits from Impersonal Personalization

Toronto, ON Monday, April 7, 2008

It was certainly a sight to see as the Gotcha Gang sauntered slowly down Bay Street on their horses on Monday afternoon. More than a few people chuckled and pointed, thinking that these ruffians must surely have lost their way, but the Gotcha Gang knew exactly why they had come to the Big Smoke: it was all about business.

Just down the street, the good people at Live for Life Investments had been feeling that their marketing materials were getting a little stale and outdated. They had seen some state of the art pieces that included personalization directly within the ad copy and elected to sink quite a bit of money into spicing up their marketing materials with some of these new techniques. Looking at their current database, a new marketing plan was devised, which included sending out 150,000 state of the art, personalized direct mail pieces. Everyone expected the campaign to be a real hit.

To get things rolling, Patty Plume was contracted to create some ad copy with pull, and with instructions to embed both contact names and company names directly into her text. Patty was a seasoned writer, though, and did an excellent job with the ad copy and overall design of the new marketing materials.

Patty had been planning a well-deserved vacation for quite some time, and before leaving, she sat down with the technical team to show them exactly where the substitutions were to be made for the variable print throughout the marketing pieces. Harvey Hammer, the IT specialist, told Patty not to worry and that he "had it".

The following Monday, Harvey pulled the data and created the merged file, which he sent off to their printer to run the job in full colour on a digital press. When the proofs came back everything looked fine. "George" at "R-Star Ventures" substituted perfectly and Harvey signed off.

Unfortunately, he failed to recognize some of the data issues that would affect many of the other pieces. First, there was an issue of inconsistent data entry, which resulted in more than half the file having address information in a field that was reserved for company name information. In other cases, the field was simply left empty. To make matters worse, some records were missing complete or partial contact information, while still others had been imported from a legacy mainframe system on which data had been maintained in upper case.

For all the previous, generic mailings, Harvey had developed several workarounds that allowed him to create properly formatted addresses. With the new level of personalization however, this data mishmash was blueprint for disaster!

A few days later, the printed pieces arrived at the Live for Life offices. Harvey picked up the first few pieces and raced them up to his boss, Mr. Jeremy Blast. Glancing down at the small stack he had picked up, he noted that the piece was fully personalized for "George" at "R-Star Ventures" and felt reassured that everything had gone according to plan.

"Looks Great," Mr. Blast said when he glanced at the first piece, but as he flipped to the next piece, he noticed a bizarre phrase in the copy: "We hope that things are going well at Suite 14, 141 Ashburn Way." Puzzled, he turned to the third piece, which closed off with the words: "Joe, we would be pleased to provide a quote for _ at any time." Still other pieces had greetings of "Dear K," and "Dear MR OTTO BRAUN," and even the embarrassingly incomplete "Dear ,".

Harvey could only watch with growing discomfort as Mr. Blast’s face blanched to a ghostly white before slowly changing to a beet red. Harvey was sure that he could see a trace of steam coming out of Mr. Blast’s purple ears as he muttered something about useless pieces and wasted money

The pieces, with all of their variable oddities, certainly could not be mailed, and the entire print job of 150,000 had to be written off at a cost of over $85,000. All told, it was a tidy contribution to the coffers of the nefarious Gotcha Gang.

"It was a matter of the right data in the wrong fields," said Inspector Hamish McMoney, who was asked to comment on the situation, "and it happens to companies of all sizes. When it comes to basic addressing, things usually work out, but when it comes to advanced personalization, bad data can have disastrous implications.

"Today, more than ever, data is one of the key factors contributing to the success, or failure, of direct marketing programs. Inaccurate data costs companies money and poorly organized data can result in humiliating embarrassment. Unfortunately, Live for Life Investments learned all this the hard way."

For her part, a dumbstruck Patty Plume returned from vacation, devastated that this could have happened. Poor Harvey Hammer was "blasted" to say the least, though kept on in a diminished capacity. However, as Mr. Blast’s department had cost the company a lot of money, his reputation as a manager was severely tarnished and he left the company a few months later.

Meanwhile, the Gotcha Gang were learning that company data was a particularly good place to look for more easy pickings. As they lay back in their posh hotel suite, they began mapping out elaborate plans to start working the "data scene" right across the country.

Please note that the Gotcha Gang is not Canada Post. The Gotcha Gang represents the effect of decisions that result in paying excess postage, labour costs or minimizing opportunity. Most of these releases are based on actual events, though dates and locations may be fictitious.