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Comment by andreasvc | Hacker News Reader

This is so pointless. People have positive associations with handwritten letters because of the content that goes with it. If marketeers start using handwritten letters they will just ruin that association.

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But in the few years before the association is ruined, those marketers that successfully fool people into reading their junk mail will make money.

Exactly. Moloch in action.

"A basic principle unites all of the multipolar traps above. In some competition optimizing for X, the opportunity arises to throw some other value under the bus for improved X. Those who take it prosper. Those who don’t take it die out. Eventually, everyone’s relative status is about the same as before, but everyone’s absolute status is worse than before. The process continues until all other values that can be traded off have been – in other words, until human ingenuity cannot possibly figure out a way to make things any worse."

http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

Or just piss off a lot of people for wasting their time.

Everybody assumes if i see your advert I'm going to buy your product regardless how i run into it that's just plain not true.

It may actually have the opposite effect I'll remember it for wasting my time and avoid that annoying company that is spending way too much on advertizing instead of doing something useful with it.

This is not how advertisements work. You're not "persuaded" by a single ad. Rather you are primed into believing it. A few days (or even hours) after you've seen an ad, you forget the source, but the content remains in your memory. The next time you see similar content, it will be more likely to stick. This goes on a few iterations, and pretty soon, out of a given population, the average individual is more likely to behave as suggested by the advertisement. What you thing during the advertisement is only secondary.

I know that theory, but I suspect it doesn't apply to these faux personal messages. For example you might get a coupon from some company because of your birthday, and the goal is clearly to get you to use that coupon within, say, two weeks. The handwriting is thus intended as a nudge towards immediate action as opposed to mass media advertisements which prime you for brand recognition.

Well you are more likely to read a seemingly handwritten letter then a printed one. That alone will expose a greater proportion to the content, where they'll be primed to certain keywords more likely to be picked up at a later through a mass broadcasted medium. And by that time, perhaps they'll relate that keyword to some personalized source, hence, a greater effect. You know, just like coupons relate a sense of favor to keywords/logos and therefor have a greater effect on persuasive power of a given proportion of the population.

So? Marketeers didn't pay for that association and aren't really invested in not exhausting it.

Sure, and it wouldn't be the first advertisement strategy predicated on fooling people. I just think that any goodwill associated with handwriting will quickly evaporate and on top of that it will make their marketing copy less legible (handwriting takes more effort to scan/skim). I'd say it's a lose-lose situation.

> I'd say it's a lose-lose situation.

Like many others that marketing/sales do to earn a quick buck while deteriorating the human condition even more. This is systemized abuse of human trust, and it makes society worse off.

Time to invest in wax and a signet ring

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