Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Google Is Going Postal In Sweden

Posted by timothy on from the cool-uniforms-there dept.

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."

13 of 93 comments (clear)

  1. That's all we need by Chrisq · · Score: 3, Funny

    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.

    1. Re:That's all we need by Bromskloss · · Score: 5, Funny

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

      --
      Swedish plasma phys. PhD student; MSc EE; knows maths, programming, electronics; finance interest; seeks opportunities
  2. Huh, Google getting help? by cappp · · Score: 5, Insightful
    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.

    1. Re:Huh, Google getting help? by tomhudson · · Score: 3, Insightful
      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).

    2. Re:Huh, Google getting help? by xaxa · · Score: 3, 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.

  3. Please not more fliers... please! by Jeeeb · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Please not more fliers... please! by vegiVamp · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.

      --
      What a depressingly stupid machine.
  4. At least their spam filter still works by lars_stefan_axelsson · · Score: 5, Informative

    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...

    --
    Stefan Axelsson
  5. Don't be evil? by dangitman · · Score: 3, 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.

    --
    ... and then they built the supercollider.
  6. Real-world spam is evil. by slasho81 · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

  7. Re:Going postal? by IBBoard · · Score: 4, Informative

    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)

  8. Re:Editors by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

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

    Sadly this has been refuted by science.

  9. Re:Editors by tomhudson · · Score: 4, Funny

    '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