Quite by chance, I recently happened to be in the factory where they print this ordinary looking but deceptively complex 12-page Coles flyer. It’s an interesting process because while, on the surface, this looks like just another coupon booklet, the idea is that it should be possible for every recipient – and we’re talking millions here – to get a different set of offers.
Apparently, information gathered from shoppers’ buying habits and their loyalty program preferences will be used to personalise each mail-out so that every piece is unique and targeted to the recipient. In theory, this makes it statistically more likely that people will respond to the offers.
As the ribbon of paper unfolds, our desires are reflected back at us, a crude mirror image of who we are (I shop therefore I am) compiled byte by byte by huge data sieves that track and trace our daily needs.
This example, which came in the post just a few days after I’d seen where they were being produced, is not a particularly good example of the process. It lacks any specific, tailored marketing offers, as far as I can tell, which is probably due to the lack of information that has been collected about my shopping habits.
Nevertheless, it is still a pretty impressive production. It’s quite straightforward to personalise a printed document with names and addresses and numerical information – any mail merge will do that – but this document is attempting to do it in full colour at high speed (thousands of pages per minute) using quite complex marketing information, all printed double-sided in a single pass, sheeted, perforated, folded and ready to mail out – and it has to be 100 per cent accurate (I don’t want to receive offers for dog food or beauty products).
Meh, I hear you say. This is pretty much what we’ve come to expect in a digital world – clever machines that know exactly what we like, where we’ve been and who we’ve met. Everybody expects to be treated as an individual in Internetland – for goodness sakes, that’s where we live, that’s our identity! True enough, but it’s quite hard to translate all that detail and nuance into mass production; we may be all individuals but there very few things we buy or consume that are unique to us.
How to connect that personalised, digital world with the world of mass production and consumption is still a challenge. Coles has done it with a simple flyer; mass production, individualised item. Down, down, deeper and down.
I know, it doesn’t look like much but this is a truly remarkable document. Humans have been incapable of doing this until very recently; the technology required to print this way is younger than the iPhone or Twitter. This is cutting-edge, folks!
Certainly the people involved in its production are very excited by the possibilities. Will it work? We’ll see, but for the moment let us bask in the knowledge that, today, mankind is producing a more technologically-advanced strain of ephemera than has ever been seen before.
