You've Got Mail...and I'm reading it...

One of my most admired friends, Mark, is on a 6 month assignment for Pfizer with Family Health International in Nepal, and I get to look through all his mail !  Yippeeee !

For a junk mail merchant like me, it's a dream job.  Once upon a time, I was a magazine circulation pro, and was responsible for some small portion of the junk mail flow coursing through the US, Italian, and French postal systems on an annual basis.  Taking a page out of the book of my great Harvard B School marketing prof, Harry Hansen, I always thought I'd learn a lot about what mail we receive and open, how we buy, and who competes for our time and attention by monitoring the daily inflow in typical consumers' mailboxes.  Now, I finally can!

I still get some of Jase's mail at home, but it's a trickle, and he benefits from personal delivery of the good stuff when we meet up here and yon.  But, with Mark it's the motherlode.  Every 2 weeks, my job is to head down to his apartment and sift through the mail to see if there's anything that looks important enough to forward on.  Fun.  Aside from the mounds of porno (joke !), there's the usual collection of magazines, bills, and solicitations of all kinds.  Not very different from my own mix.

I won't go into detail, but the fascination is borderline voyeuristic, I'll admit.  And I can report now from the experience of 2 mailboxes that the print direct marketing biz appears live and well.