Google Is Going Postal In Sweden 93
An anonymous reader writes "Google will start to collaborate with the Swedish Postal Service (Swedish original) to sell direct marketing to small businesses, both in the form of fliers (delivered by the Swedish Postal Service) and keyword advertising in Google Search. The area of distribution for the fliers is selected in Google Maps. Google will also will provide templates for the design of the fliers.The idea was concieved within the Swedish Postal Service."
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After watching Visiting Uwe - the Uwe Boll homestory I completely reassessed my opinions of Herr Boll.
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Many people have told me Postal was actually a decent movie (and not just by Uwe Boll standards).
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Doesn't "going postal" usually involve guns and mass murder? Dammit google, you were meant to be subtle about doing evil things.
Re:Going postal? (Score:5, Informative)
Not always. Pratchett's Going Postal [amazon.co.uk] didn't have much killing (unless you include the indirect deaths attributed to Moist von Lipwig's con artist antics that Mr Pump counts up)
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Clearly neither of you understand the concept of a pune, or play on words..
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Which pune? The article title one is obvious, but is a somewhat failed attempt. If it was a story about someone losing their job and then shredding or burning letters then it'd be "going postal" (albeit without the death) and would be a fitting title pune.
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I think the pun in both cases is that the phrase "going postal" is well known these days for going on a killing spree, but in fact in said cases it simply refers to the postal service. Kind of an anti-pun.
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Kinda like the "horniest" dinosaurs article we had recently.
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Not just the headline... (Score:2)
The idea was concieved [sic] within the Swedish Postal Service."
I before E, except after C.
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I before E, except after C.
Except for species, science, sufficient, ancient, society, seize, weird, theism, eight, weight, protein, sovereignty, foreign, vein, feisty, kaleidoscope, being, neighbour, their and numerous other words.
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I before E, except after C and words that sound "Eh" as in Neighbor and Weigh, or all the other words we basically jacked from Greek or Latin, often by way of French, which won't fit into little rhyming ditties and so are just left as an exercise for the reader.
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...which reminds of that old rhyme...
Thirty days have September, April, June and November. All the rest have 31 except for February all alone which has 28 most of the time except for when it has 29 this doesn't really scan oh I give up.
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That's all we need (Score:4, Funny)
Re:That's all we need (Score:5, Funny)
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I think it should be the other way around: register if you want ads.
I can hear the gnashing and wailing from the marketers already, but they can go hang :)
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Whatever. The post box will be overflowing with flyers from consumer electronics sites, DVD/Game rentals, fast food deliveries, and geeky merchandising outfits long before the first porn leaflet gets a look in.
Huh, Google getting help? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Huh, Google getting help? (Score:4, Insightful)
Think of it in relation to another medium - TV - there are more ads now, in part because ads were split into segments as short as 15 seconds - so that allowed overall ad revenue to increase, while individual ads are now less effective.
Or compare it to junk mail - I now get so much that it ALL goes straight into the recycling bin (though I *do* keep the plastic bags they come in to use when walking my dogs).
Once any advertising medium carries more than a certain prcentage of ads, people resort to all sorts of tactics to become "ad-blind". With TV ad radio, it's channel-surfing. With junk mail, it's the recycling bin. With online ads, eye-tracking studies show people never even look at those parts of the page any more (and this doesn't count ad-block, etc).
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Re:Huh, Google getting help? (Score:4, Informative)
Language specific ads are just a case of region specific ads.
For example, if I search "parcel" using Google (which knows I'm in the UK) all the adverts are for British companies, showing prices in pounds. If I search "paket" on Google.se the adverts are all for Swedish companies.
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I assumed that a British company would buy a word -- probably an English word -- and ask that their ads only be shown to people in Britain. A Swedish company will buy a word -- probably Swedish -- and ask for the ads to be shown only in Sweden.
After all, if the British user can't understand Swedish there's not much point going to a Swedish website. If the Swedish website is also in English, the owner can buy the English adword anyway.
If you go to https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal?defaul [google.com]
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I guess that for me, it's not just the increased number of ads that we see these days, it's the resulting decreased signal to noise ratio. I remember when I was younger, there seemed to be fewer commercials and they didn't seem to bother me as much. Now, by default I tune out any commercial, or use them to help me decide to not buy a product. There have been some improvements in TV anyway. For instance, car commercials were really dry (though I still wouldn't buy a car because of a commercial). Also, we now
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I remember when I was younger, there seemed to be fewer commercials and they didn't seem to bother me as much.
Leela: Didn't you have ads in the 21st century?"
Fry: Well sure, but not in our dreams. Only on TV and radio, and in magazines, and movies, and at ball games... and on buses and milk cartons and t-shirts, and bananas and written on the sky. But not in dreams, no siree.
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The ONLY benefactor is google.
I don't think thats the word you looking for. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benefactor [wikipedia.org]
Perhaps beneficiary is what you meant to say. I don't usually call out spelling/grammatical errors, but the wrong word here changes the entire meaning of your statement... aside from that, I agree with you.
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-- Barbie
Please not more fliers... please! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Please not more fliers... please! (Score:4, Informative)
The only ones who ignore it are delivery people who don't speak dutch (you may have heard something about Belgium's language struggles
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Have you tried simply putting up a "No flyers please" sticker ?
This works too well where I live: my girlfriend didn't receive her IKEA catalog, one "flier" that she wanted. So she took the sticker off our mailbox.
People here who deliver fliers tend to be unemployed, trying to make a few Euros with honest grunt work. So I have a heart for them, and don't mind tossing the 139th pizza service flier into the recycling bin.
However, if the postal service starts conniving with Google to deliver fliers here, the sticker will go up again.
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in the US, you cannot opt-out of receiving physical junk-mail.
I tried asking my local postman if he would even do me a favor and just NOT cram my inbox with paper ads and 'newspapers'. he said he'd love to oblige but he'd get in trouble since he's PAID to deliver that crap.
that's the problem. the PO thinks they have been paid to do a service and they're not smart enough to realize that the receiver SHOULD be able to xoff (heh) the mail he does not ever read or want! clearly, there is mass mail and unicas
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It's really wasteful. out of about 4 million tons, only half even gets open.
As an aside, how does an airtight wood stove work? wouldn't it need air to burn? And what happens to all the wax, ink, and plastic gas?
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it makes me sick seeing how much truly wasted paper comes into my mailbox. sick that there's not a thing I can do to stop it, either.
other countries, yes. you can put a sticker on your mailbox. not in the united states of corporate america. peoples' rights always (now) come after those of corporations.
I never understand all the outrage about email spam when there's absolutely nothing being done about the more environmentally harmful and more costly (to me, time wise) junk mail spam.
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I don't know a single ISP that accepts that for email. They wouldn't last half an hour.
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How about you get off your ass and do something? Start a group, organize, get it so we can put stickers on the box. Or better, an opt out system that forces the return of the piece of bulk mail to the sender at their cost.
I know you won't, because being a whiny bitch is easier.
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At least their spam filter still works (Score:5, Informative)
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"I never thought I'd see the day where they would encourage junk mail."
It's the only thing that gets still sent with snail mail, it's more or less all the business that's left.
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It's because it's not quite "the swedish postal service" any more. It's "Posten AB" ("AB" would be "Inc." in english?) now, albeit the majority of stock is owned by the state, I believe.
In the good old socialist days the postal service didn't have to turn a profit. They could hire the "sick and the lame", you didn't have to be overworked, you could send a crystal bowl in wrapping paper without it braking and there used to be a department at one of the terminals where employees would investigate where any in
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I don't think they've privatized the postal service even in the US, the beacon of free-marketeers.
Beacon, Lisa? Or bacon?
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I used to work for Posten AB for a while before being sacked for not showing up for work for a month or two. Once we were sent on a conference trip on a real slow boat to Helsinki town.
Our boss held a pep-talk about efficiency and profitability. I asked if they'd shut down the postal service if we weren't profitable. The boss said "Of course not! The postal service is an institution!"
Posten is an interesting case of a company committing suicide.
And they're still at it. IIRC they made a decent profit last year. When asked what they would do with the money, they replied that they would use it to sack more people ...
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Actually, it's not required by Swedish law. There would be many free speech issues with such regulation. However, the companies realize that it's in their best interest not to ignore the wishes of the people they want to do business with, so they are generally respected. Some companies who deliver the flyers independently chose to ignore this, most notably real estate agents, pizza places with home delivery and political parties.
Not delivering mail (junk or not) addressed to you would be illegal, though.
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You may well be right there, I'm working from dim memory, I remember it as technically a form of trespassing (aka, "I've told you to sod off, so sod off!").
I can't see where the free speech issues would come in though. You only have the right to free speech, not to force others to listen to you. If people got the idea to stand on my lawn and shout political slogans, they'd be out of there in no time flat.
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Re:Editors (Score:4, Funny)
> 'I' before 'E', except after 'C'
Sadly this has been refuted by science.
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'I' before 'E', except after 'C'. It's conceived, not concieved.
Seriously, how difficult is it to find an editor who can spell?
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or hire a professional trade editor.
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How difficult it is to install a damn spellchecker in the editor's browser?
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Don't be evil? (Score:4, Interesting)
Encouraging the wasteful printing of advertising material and the associated wastage of fuel to deliver it, and annoy people in the process? That's not really a good thing to do. I thought the whole deal with the internet was that we didn't need to send send information on a physical medium.
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Twice a week I get a bundle of junk mail (fliers, etc) in a large plastic bag. Twice a week, it goes, unread, into the recycling bin (except for the plastic bags, which I use to "stoop and scoop"). There's TOO MUCH advertising for me to bother wasting my time reading it.
It's the same with on-line advertising. There's TOO MUCH, so it all gets ignored.
It'
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It's more then that. a lot of companies use it because they think it works. There still sin't a reliable way to see if ti does work. Just like TV advertising. No one really knew how effective it was and if they were watched. Lo-and - bohold one of the bi-product we* learn from TiVO is that a lot of people never watch commercials. They use that time for other things. And the TV execs freaked out when their little secret got out. TV Advertising works about a tenth what people thought it did. The have learned,
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Yeah, those 100's of million of people can't find a way to send a message in facebook. The problem is that facebook is popular and you hate whatever is popular.
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Today, a facebook fail made me look good! (Score:2)
So, a few minutes to code around it, and a proposal to permanently remove it and replace it with something better :-)
Failbook makes me look good.
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You have a point about the Internet supposedly replacing paper, but if you think delivering direct-mail advertisements is evil then I would suggest you look for some perspective.
Firstly, I never actually outright declared it to be evil. Personally, I don't really believe in the concept of evil, but apparently Google does, or they never would have mentioned the word in their mission statement, so that kind of of sets off alarm bells in the first place.
Secondly, it's not about the actual delivering of direct-mail advertising. It's about the encouragement thereof. It's also about value statements. The companies that mail junk advertising aren't claiming to be bastions of goodness. The
Hmm. (Score:2)
Real-world spam is evil. (Score:5, Insightful)
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do no evil never works for a US corp.
the biggest con in recent times is google 'convincing' tech geeks that they are a Good Guy(tm).
come on, people. haven't you learned to sort out the doublespeak yet?
google is an advertising company. we used to hate those. many of us are not fooled by the eye candy and know google to be just another money-grubbing company in the valley, exploiting its youth-oriented workforce and annoying people left and right with all the advertising that goes on.
I don't know about you
Just what i need. (Score:1)
I was just this very moment thinking of sending flyers. Being able to select and order a campaign easily is worth much to me.
Ill be sure to try this out as soon as its released.
"Great" (Score:2, Insightful)
lemme guess (Score:2)
In analogy with their gmail service, they will be allowed, per the license agreement, to open our packets and perform data mining. And this will of course improve our user experience.
Woooo. (Score:1)
This is all part of Google's genius "let's get hated" national/international market strategy.
Long thin tail? (Score:2)
Google is trying to fatten up the long thin tail.
No more junk mail (Score:2)
Oh.. (Score:2)
I thought you would mail them a search query and they would mail you a result back.
That could revive the dying postal industry!
April Fools Day Joke Reference? (Score:1)
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