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The other day, I got this envelope in the mail.\u00a0 It was addressed to me in actual handwriting, in a nondescript plain white standard 5×3 envelope.\u00a0 At first, I thought it might have been another wedding invitation, or maybe a card or something from the past, two of the only things that I could really warrant receiving mail from.\u00a0 There was no return address anywhere on the envelope either, so for a fleeting moment, I thought maybe it was full of anthrax or something too.<\/span><\/p>\n Inside the envelope was a folded piece of newspaper, and a post-it note with some fairly illegible cursive writing, signed off \u201c-J\u201d at the very end.\u00a0 I figured the newspaper must have been concealing something, acting as a wrapper for something else, maybe a card or a ticket, or something.\u00a0 But it turns out that there\u2019s nothing at all.\u00a0 It was just a sheet of newsprint.<\/span><\/p>\n I took another stab at reading the post-it note, and realized it said \u201cup to $3,500 for your trade-in!<\/em>\u201d\u00a0 And then I took another look at the actual newsprint itself, and it coincidentally a page for a Toyota dealership in the Atlanta area.\u00a0 It then dawned on me that this whole elaborate ruse was nothing but a creepily personalized advertisement, meant to fool me into thinking that an acquaintance really wants me to look at a Toyota.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n I examined the post-it in the light to see if I could see indentation from a pen, and sure enough, it looked legitimately hand-written.\u00a0 The handwriting on the envelope matched the post-it.\u00a0 The envelope also seemed to have a postage stamp mark from within Atlanta, and I certainly know that other than wedding\/formal occasions, nobody remotely local would bother to mail me anything.<\/span><\/p>\n But the point remains is that a tremendous amount of effort evidently went into some sneaky form of advertisement. \u00a0There\u2019s actually someone at this dealership who\u2019s sitting in an office with a stack of newspaper sheets, envelopes and post-it notes, hand folding, hand writing, licking and stamping hundreds of letters, and writing everything themselves so that it looks personal and authentic.<\/span><\/p>\n I\u2019m a bit astonished at this idea, but the truth of the matter is that it certainly was effective at getting my attention, and getting me to open and look at everything at least once.\u00a0 And I\u2019m writing about it now too, so in some capacity, I guess it really does work.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The other day, I got this envelope in the mail.\u00a0 It was addressed to me in actual handwriting, in a nondescript plain white standard 5×3 envelope.\u00a0 At first, I thought it might have been another wedding invitation, or maybe a card or something from the past, two of the only things that I could really … Continue reading Creepily personal advertising<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[83,15,49],"class_list":["post-31272","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-brog","tag-observations","tag-og","tag-wtf"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31272","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=31272"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31272\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31274,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31272\/revisions\/31274"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=31272"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=31272"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=31272"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n