Google Is Going Postal In Sweden

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."

Comments

That's all we need

[Chrisq]

A google search could result in targeted marketing flyers through the door. Imagine all the slashdotters explaining to their mums why they are suddenly getting so many personally addressed letters from pornographic publishers.

Re:That's all we need

[Bromskloss]

You just put a robots.txt file outside your door.

Re:That's all we need

[houghi]

You just put a robots.txt file outside your door.

In Belgium you do that by registering on the http://www.robinsonlist.be/

Huh, Google getting help?

[cappp]

Completely opposite to what I expected. Seems the Postal Service is helping Google reach out to businesses to increase their use of keyword searches rather than Google helping a struggling Postal system - at least that's what the end of the article seems to suggest. Perhaps a testbed for a new business model?

Direct mail is a familiar medium to small businesses. Buying the keywords you are less familiar with. – Many people are interested in an online presence, but there are only a few percent of Sweden's 500 000 small businesses that use keywords in their marketing, says Google's Country Manager Sweden Stina Honkamaa.

Re:Huh, Google getting help?

[tomhudson]

Even with "only a few percent" buying keywods, the on-line ad market is already saturated. More businesses buying google ads isn't going to increase the ads effectiveness - quite the contrary, it dilutes the product. The ONLY benefactor is google.

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).

Re:Huh, Google getting help?

[cappp]

I wondered about the same thing, but then I got thinking about language specific ads - Google pretty much has the English language ads business neatly sorted out. The only real way to expand is to access the smaller western markets where ads can make a decent payout and it's worth the hassle of translation and so on. Wiki claims there are 10 million Swedish speakers and, rather importantly, that Swedish is mutually intelligible with both Norwegian (5mil) and Danish (6mil). That's another 21 million speakers they can access, a tiny market sure but one that's otherwise probably going untapped. I imagine that gives Google some great access to native speakers and therefore the ability to increase the reliability of their translation programs and other beneficial knock-on effects.

Re:Huh, Google getting help?

[xaxa]

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.

Re:Huh, Google getting help?

[cappp]

Huh, this I did not know. Surely you need someone to sit down and create your great list of synonyms and word links specific to each language? I had always assumed Google sold a word and then all those words "adjacent" to it - so looking for "parcel" would also bring up searches for related close terms like "brown paper", "string", "shipping", and so on. I'm guessing thats wrong?

Re:Huh, Google getting help?

[Combatso]

The ONLY benefactor is google.

I don't think thats the word you looking for. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benefactor

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.

Re:Going postal?

[Dexter Herbivore]

Agreed, I had nightmares about Uwe Boll making another film when I read that.

Please not more fliers... please!

[Jeeeb]

I _HATE_ getting fliers jammed into my letter box. I feel almost as violated as when I get marketing calls. What gives them the right to use my property like that and disturb me in my home? Not only that it's a blatant waste of resources, and I have to go to the effort of putting them in the paper recycling.

Re:Please not more fliers... please!

[vegiVamp]

Have you tried simply putting up a "No flyers please" sticker ? Worked wonders for me. I now have about one box of trash paper every two months or something.

The only ones who ignore it are delivery people who don't speak dutch (you may have heard something about Belgium's language struggles :-p ) and the occasional politician's zealots during election periods. Neither of those flyers elicits my further business, and I've made this clear to the originators on several occasions.

Re:Please not more fliers... please!

[PolygamousRanchKid]

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.

Re:Please not more fliers... please!

[TheGratefulNet]

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 unicast regular old mail. when papers come, they are never confused with personal unicast email yet the PO will refuse to NOT deliver that to you.

talk about opt-out lists all you want, they simply don't work in the US. companies find ways to work around it.

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.

At least their spam filter still works

[lars_stefan_axelsson]

I never thought I'd see the day where they would encourage junk mail. As a Swede; my "Please no advertisements" sticker on the mailbox is generally respected (it has to be, by law). But the stuff that's directly addressed to me, i.e. that which is handed out by the Postal Service, is more difficult to get rid of. "Hooray no spam here!" indeed...

Re:At least their spam filter still works

[migla]

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 incomplete address, to anywhere in the world might be. Letters to some village somewhere in Africa that were missing a postal code would be routed via this terminal in Stockholm.

All of that isn't very efficient, of course and paid for with taxes, but In my opinion it was nice enough to warrant paying for it. (or rather, if I'd earned taxed income, I'd happily paid for a socialist postal service. I don't believe they tax social security benefits)

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!" I let the rest of the argument be implicit.

I don't think they've privatized the postal service even in the US, the beacon of free-marketeers.

Don't be evil?

[dangitman]

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.

Re:Don't be evil?

[tomhudson]

Google's problem is that they need "fresh meat" to make up for all those businesses that used adwords, found they weren't effective, and dropped them.

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's the same with failbook and twatter. The volume of crap ruins the product as an effective way to convey a message, whether it's online or in my mailbox.

Real-world spam is evil.

[slasho81]

What about do no evil? Junk mail is very evil.

Re:Going postal?

[IBBoard]

Not always. Pratchett's Going Postal 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)

Re:Editors

[Anonymous Coward]

> 'I' before 'E', except after 'C'

Sadly this has been refuted by science.

Re:Editors

[tomhudson]

'I' before 'E', except after 'C'. It's conceived, not concieved.

Seriously, how difficult is it to find an editor who can spell?

1. There are so many weird exceptions
2. This is slashdot, where "editor" is a suggestion. Want better spelling and editing - hire a foreigner.
3. You must be new here

"Great"

[Daerath]

Just what the world needs. More paper-based junkmail. Google is starting to look like Obama

Re:Going postal?

[somersault]

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.

Re:How's this news?

[delinear]

Google is the middleman.