Snail Mail Spam

Friday, January 28. 2005

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:

Best info, from July 1998 (apparently a Washington Post article)
November 1997 (scroll to the bottom)
June 2004

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."

Posted by Mike Boone in Misc at 22:57 | Comments (3) | Trackbacks (0)

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how weird -- i received one of these exact things myself, except the "Executive Focus" mag was dated Septemer 2005, not Jan!

#1 CJS on 2005-10-05 14:44 (Reply)

I, too, just received one of these ads. (Executive Focus, January 2006 Issue) I thought it pretty clever as a scrolled my mental archive, to no avail, of folks I know who might sign with just the initial, "J." The postmark was California and I couldn't make a match. Pretty clever ad, though, as it bounced around my desk for a few weeks before ending up in the proverbial circular file...

#2 Mark Ippolito on 2006-02-12 12:33 (Reply)

I got this too, Jan. 2006 issue of Executive Focus. I thought for awhile about who could have sent it to me, then I came across this board. It's actually pretty clever... devious, but clever. In any event, they won't be getting my money.

#3 Larry DiClever on 2007-01-17 18:24 (Reply)

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