And how did this enormous nationwide surveillance apparatus, without even the merest hint of oversight or regulation, come to exist? The mail, ladies and gentlemen. That’s right, the postage-stamp people. Get this. By the Post Office’s own figures, direct-mail advertising resulted in over $17 billion in revenue to the Post Office in postage alone, propping up what would otherwise be a bankrupt organization. The entire direct-mail industry, that crap in the mail you throw away, is surely north of a $50 billion a year industry if you consider design, printing, targeting data, and postage. To put
And how did this enormous nationwide surveillance apparatus, without even the merest hint of oversight or regulation, come to exist? The mail, ladies and gentlemen. That’s right, the postage-stamp people. Get this. By the Post Office’s own figures, direct-mail advertising resulted in over $17 billion in revenue to the Post Office in postage alone, propping up what would otherwise be a bankrupt organization. The entire direct-mail industry, that crap in the mail you throw away, is surely north of a $50 billion a year industry if you consider design, printing, targeting data, and postage. To put that in perspective, all of Google makes just over that much in a year. In 2014, online marketers spent about $19 billion on display (basically, the Internet other than Google and Facebook). So we’ve got almost another Google, three Internets, or three Facebooks of money waiting in the offline sidelines. Think about that for a second, particularly if you, like me, live in the maelstrom of pixels and electrons that characterizes contemporary digital life. To do direct mail, you have to kill a tree, make it into paper, hire a designer, print something pretty on it, properly package or envelope the thing, and then pay the Post Office around $.20 in bulk to send it. Do the math. It works out to about $1,000 CPMs (cost per thousand views). Most online media sells for somewhere around $1 CPM, perhaps a bit more. That means online advertising can get away with being a thousand times less ef...
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How online identity gets matched to offline identity by companies like Datalogix, Neustar, Liveramp
