Informed What?!?
December 26, 2018   Dave Lewis

Yes, it’s a new Informed – Informed Address.  Unable to afford a new page in the dictionary, the Postal Service has rolled out a new Informed product.  Informed Address allows the Postal Service to substitute a consumer’s physical address with a unique code, that only letter carriers, apparently with USPS assigned Little Orphan Annie Decoder Rings™, can decode and deliver.  The objective is to allow the Postal Service to sort of share addresses without providing an actual address.  So they can give you a group of letters and digits that will allow you to have a piece of mail arrive at someone’s house…umm…that kind of sounds like an address.  But a secret one. Anyhoo, that’s the principal – turning a privacy-laden actual address with a fun-to-share address code. The first proposed application for this new technology to send targeted offers to consumers.  Consumers can explore a targeted offers link from their Informed Delivery Daily Digest, and tell USPS what kind of offers they may be interested in.  Then, when the Postal Service sees an offer that matches the consumer’s interests they can share that consumer’s address with the advertiser.  But not the actual private address, but the secret coded IA “address.”  Then the mailer can send a piece of mail to that interested consumer.  Oh, and the consumer will have access to the digital ad, too, but only if they go looking for it, or something like that. Clearly there remains a lot of work to be done on this concept, but expect to hear a lot about it in the coming months, and at the National Postal Forum.  We’re really trying to be open minded here…

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