Canada Post to trade on trusted name to offer interactive marketing service

Canada Post hopes to build on its position of trust in the Canadian marketplace to deliver targeted interactive advertising to consumers. The company is testing a new service dubbed fetch that entices potential customers to ask for more information on items they see advertised in print, hear on radio and see on television. The system, built by a coalition of heavy-hitting technology players, will use wireless SMS short codes and telephony interactive voice response to deliver information in a way Canada Post promises will be anonymous. Further, Canada Post promises that requesting information from the advertisers won’t lead a deluge of unwanted marketing attention. The service has been three years in the making, a length of time that Post director of marketing and product development Warren Tomlin chalks up to getting the plumbing right. "We thought it would just be a matter of welding these different technologies together," he says. As it turns out, the final architecture relies on an SMS back end built by Impact Mobile, an interactive voice response system built by Pulse, a comprehensive back end built by Sun Microsystems, all hosted by CGI and with Innovapost providing the service. So far, 12 Calgary companies are testing fetch in a paid trial. They are: Shoppers Drug Mart, Safeway, TELUS, Dominos Pizza, Royal Lepage Benchmark, Royal Lepage Pinnacle, Royal Lepage Foothills, H&R Block, Whisky Nightclub, Mynt Ultralounge, CitiFinancial, and Pointe of View Development. To use the system, customers look for a fetch keyword and call an IVR number or text message the keyword to the system to receive further information from an advertiser. Customers can pre-register as fetch users to speed response times. Keywords will be included in magazine, billboard, television and online advertising, and there will also be a distinctive fetch tone that will alert radio listeners that more information is to be had. The material, which might include coupons and other call-to-action material, is instantaneously provided over the phone, via email, or by text message. Tomlin says the project comes out of a research and development effort at Canada Post by a small team striving to build on the 150-year-old organization’s reputation for carefully guarding Canadians’ privacy. The thrust of marketing initiatives over the years has been increasingly intrusive, he argues, from telemarketing to direct and bulk mail. He says the Internet has deepened consumers’ antipathy to advertising. "Spam wrecked that channel in record time," he says. The fetch offering will build trust, he says, because consumers are assured their personal information will never fall in the hands of third parties. Though development work was done when executives could find time from their "day jobs", says Tomlin, it was the Groundbreaker Funded Canadian Idol that gave senior management the confidence to devote resources to it. New media producers were miffed in 2003 when they learned that the cash – earmarked from the benefits package offered by BCE Inc. to take over CTV Inc. – was tagged for the smash hit show (CNM, July 11/03; Sept. 26/03). A senior CTV executive at the time defended the decision to use Groundbreaker funds in a private letter to the CRTC in reaction to the article. In it, Susanne Boyce wrote: "We want to involve as many viewers with interactivity as we can - and at this time, that means using telephone and wireless, so that Canadians from all economic strata can be involved in the show. Further, using telephone and wireless technology for the voting process enabled us to control the security of the votes at the necessary level to ensure that the result of the voting process was correct and unimpeachable." The response by Canadians to SMS voting in Canadian Idol appears to have borne out the idea that the technology can be used successfully for mainstream offerings such as fetch, despite the misgivings of Canaidan new media producers.

Canada Post to trade on trusted name to offer interactive marketing service

News | 02/04/2005 5:00 am EST

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