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- Original Poster
- #1
It was a print blooper that had the owners of a US car dealership gasping in shock.
The idea was good. The dealership decided to run a scratch-card promotion in which one special card out of 50 000 would win a cash prize of $1,000 and in return the dealership would load up their database with the email addresses of 50 000 possible new customers.
They hired a direct marketing company to do the job -- and eagerly waited for the results.
But somewhere, somehow, someone got their wires crossed and instead of printing 49 999 losers and one winner, they managed to print 49 999 winners and one loser.
That hit the dealership with an eye-watering $49.9 million worth of promises to keep -- and that’s excluding all the costs of it.
To escape, the dealership had to admit the mistake and offer the long queue of winners a $5 gift card to a supermarket chain. Suffice to say the winners weren’t delirious with delight -- and it still cost the fuming dealership an extra $250 000.
“Oops” didn’t quite cut it.
It wasn’t a problem of strategy, concept or design. It was a problem of specification.
Unless material given to a printer comes with very specific instructions of what to do with the material, the results can be horrible -- as the (now fired) marketing company and car dealership discovered.
The mistake here lay in the finish. In this case it was a print run specification and scratch coating. The problem was that the printer couldn’t see the mistake, because every card was covered, and clearly the instruction on which card to print 49 999 times and which one to print only once was, to put it kindly, lost in translation.
You can’t be too specific and clear, and you can’t check too much.
That’s why handling print promotions requires someone with print experience to check, and check again. It’s too easy to make a mistake, and a little mistake can end up costing heavily.
Ask the car dealership.
The idea was good. The dealership decided to run a scratch-card promotion in which one special card out of 50 000 would win a cash prize of $1,000 and in return the dealership would load up their database with the email addresses of 50 000 possible new customers.
They hired a direct marketing company to do the job -- and eagerly waited for the results.
But somewhere, somehow, someone got their wires crossed and instead of printing 49 999 losers and one winner, they managed to print 49 999 winners and one loser.
That hit the dealership with an eye-watering $49.9 million worth of promises to keep -- and that’s excluding all the costs of it.
To escape, the dealership had to admit the mistake and offer the long queue of winners a $5 gift card to a supermarket chain. Suffice to say the winners weren’t delirious with delight -- and it still cost the fuming dealership an extra $250 000.
“Oops” didn’t quite cut it.
It wasn’t a problem of strategy, concept or design. It was a problem of specification.
Unless material given to a printer comes with very specific instructions of what to do with the material, the results can be horrible -- as the (now fired) marketing company and car dealership discovered.
The mistake here lay in the finish. In this case it was a print run specification and scratch coating. The problem was that the printer couldn’t see the mistake, because every card was covered, and clearly the instruction on which card to print 49 999 times and which one to print only once was, to put it kindly, lost in translation.
You can’t be too specific and clear, and you can’t check too much.
That’s why handling print promotions requires someone with print experience to check, and check again. It’s too easy to make a mistake, and a little mistake can end up costing heavily.
Ask the car dealership.
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