I guess it’s a sign of the times that the Wall Street Journal’s Venture Capital blog has an ongoing series titled “Turning Out the Lights”, chronicling various start-ups that have reached the end of their (ad)venture in capital.

One of their recent eulogies was for the junk mail opt-out site ProQuo, one of several services that over the last few years has offered to help reduce your junk mail. Unlike some sites, ProQuo was willing to help you out for free. Sort of:

“ProQuo planned to generate revenue through marketing from companies that pay for the right to market to consumers – based on consumers’ preferences.”

There are a few different ways this model could have broken down as a revenue generator, but one of them might have been that, given the choice of which advertisers they wanted to hear from, consumers often chose very few or none at all. Because consumers by and large hate junk mail, and they resent it more than other types of advertising.

This has been a hard truth for a lot of companies to grasp. There persists in the marketing industry a somewhat weird idea that even with lots of less annoying or wasteful advertising options available to them, junk mail must continue to be sent to people who don’t want it. A while back we covered this lobbyist’s advice that companies should give customers special offers via junk mail that aren’t available online or elsewhere. But why would you want to do this? Why not… meet the customer where they’d like to be met? You know, ‘the customer is always right’ and all that good stuff.

Anyway, things didn’t work out so well for ProQuo. And while I think they made an effort to address consumer frustration with junk mail’s waste and annoyance, they weren’t able to offer something enforceable, or something that could outlast the whims of venture capital and the forces of commerce.

Which is why…. we should institute a Do Not Mail Registry. And make it enforceable, like Do Not Call. Operated by the government. Preferably as part of an ambitious plan to reimagine the US Postal Service. And we consumers can be a little happier. Not receiving junk mail. Or receiving it. As is our wont.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 18th, 2009 at 11:25 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.