My wife got an interesting piece of junk mail today. It reminded me of personalized spam, because this piece of junk mail
was personalized.
She received a plain envelope addressed to her at work, with no return address. Inside was a single sheet of paper, which appeared to be a page torn out of "Executive Focus" magazine, January 2005. I couldn't find a reference to that magazine on the web. It is one of those ads that looks like a magazine article with the tiny text "advertisement" at the top. The ad is for the "Trend Letter," some periodical that costs $195 per year! They seem to have a website but I won't bother linking to it.
Attached is a post-it note that is handwritten: "Try this, It's really good! J." We were wondering who the heck "J." was when I decided to surf the net. It turns out that this is some sort of bulk mail operation, and I found references to it back to 1997. The magazine "articles" seem to change, but there's always the same text on the post-it note. Here are some links:
A quote from the first link said it best when it stated "Obviously if the personalization is perceived to be deceptive, it's not working."
