I had some post today - not the most auspicious of openers I admit - but one which sent my print sensitivities tingling. It was from Sky and, bless them, it contained piece of personalised direct mail urging me to use my massive social influence to get most of Berkshire signed up to their Sky+ service (clearly the TV ads with Parkinson weren't working to they went straight to the top: me).
The mail contained a set of cards for me to hand out to Sky+ -less pals (does that make them Sky-?). There's a lot of clever stuff Sky could have done here. I mean how about listing the shows I'll never miss because I have linked them in Sky+, or feeding in a few images from the shows I've recorded on Sky's wonder box, or what I was last watching when I benefitted from its live pause feature?
Sky skipped straight past that. Clearly my name alone was enough to woo potential customers to its service. "Matt Whipp" was rather shabbily overprinted everywhere in a font that I can't imagine even matched the rest of the item (it really was that poor).
My point? Is this it? One of the world's biggest communications companies takes on personalisation and comes up with this? My name. I know it already, and most of my friends - this is a viral campaign after all - I'm not about to stand out on the street handing out this stuff to strangers - also know it. It's probably the least engaging thing Sky could have done.
If printers are going to invest in this expensive software and equipment, there will have to be a lot more compelling uses than this muddy effort to make it worth while. In fact, I consider myself devalued by Sky, having put so little effort into making my name look good in printed form.
Surely someone somewhere has achieved more than this with personalisation both in terms of use and print quality? If so, let me know by commenting below.