Poor attempt to personalize

I got my “mine.” magazine, which I first discussed in this blog. Wow – seriously disappointing.

I knew they were going to customize Lexus ads to fit me. This was about as personal as junk mail. They even highlighted with a lighter color those sections of the ad that had been obviously mail-merged. I’ve had some experience with mail-merging, so this is what it looked like to me:
“The All-New 2010 RX. Now with more [FName] [LName].”
“It’s easy to locate the best [Destination1]s near [City] with our new voice-activated Navigation System.”

I had high hopes that the money Lexus put into this effort would have been better spent on tools to actually personalize the ads. This was plain key ring-style personalization.

The magazine also disappointed me. They totally got it wrong. Because I had to sign up for 5 out of 8 choices (3 of which I didn’t really want), I couldn’remember which I had signed up for. I think I signed up for Time, Real Simple, In Style, Money, and Travel+Leisure – in THAT order. I was really hoping that at LEAST the order I put my choices in would be considered – like, more articles from Time and fewer from Travel+Leisure. It wasn’t.

I may have signed up for Food & Wine instead of In Style. However, I’m totally positive I didn’t sign up for Sports Illustrated or Golf Magazine. What came in my “mine.” was Travel+Leisure, Real Simple, Time, In Style, and Sports Illustrated. WHAT?

The articles didn’t seem to be “picked” for me either – I think they were picked for this magazine. They were all very short, and had lots of references to stuff you can find online. One whole article (in In Style) was about jeans you can have custom-made online. I understand that a lot of what we do includes using the web, so I am used to articles referring to websites, but these articles seemed to include more “.coms” than most.

The straw that broke the camel’s back was the ridiculous advertising for the magazines I had selected. Before each set of 2 short articles, an entire page was dedicated to pointing out exactly which magazine the articles were from. White space and a bold magazine title. I don’t care about the magazine, I care about the content! That’s why I wanted “mine.” instead of each magazine! What a total waste of money.

This should have been easy. Use my name, location, and survey answers to send me relevant articles from the magazines I chose. Determine whether personalization is successful by asking me if I want to pay to keep subscribing to “mine.”

When I wrote this blog, I thought “mine.” was an attempt by a magazine company to sell more magazines by leveraging some of the lessons online companies have learned, and tools they use for personalization. Now, I think this is just a big ad to sell more of the same magazines – without any customization.

Wow, what a miss.