A mailshot that went badly wrong

Got a bit of junk mail through my door last week. It was extolling the virtues of Sky. I have Sky. What a waste of paper.

I’d normally just have junked it, but things change and sometimes you miss new services, so I decided to leaf through it anyway.

I got to the “mixes” section. Sky works like this: as well as the free channels and the premium channels, such as Sky Sports, that you pay for separately, there are a whole range of paid-for channels like Sky One that you get in bundles with other channels. You decide which of the six entertainment “mixes” contain the channels you’d like it and order none, two, four or six of them.

So I looked through the mixes, noted that there were only two that had channels in that I liked, noted further that I was paying for six mixes and immediately cancelled my subscription to the unwanted four.

The result? A poorly targeted marketing mailshot actually cost the offending company subscription revenue. Result! What a heart-warming tale.

Actually, I did have to decide whether I’d prefer the “style and culture” mix or the “knowledge” mix, since you can’t subscribe to just three mixes (two or four only). I went for ‘knowledge’ rather than ‘style’. Not sure if that was a mistake.

Which would you have picked? You can find the list on the Sky web site.

Author

  • Rob Buckley

    I’m Rob Buckley, a journalist who writes for UK media magazines that most people have never heard of although you might have heard me on the podcast Lockdown Land or Radio 5 Live’s Saturday Edition or Afternoon Edition. I’ve edited Dreamwatch, Sprocket and Cambridge Film Festival Daily; been technical editor for TV producers magazine Televisual; reviewed films for the short-lived newspaper Cambridge Insider; written features for the even shorter-lived newspaper Soho Independent; and was regularly sarcastic about television on the blink-and-you-missed-it “web site for urban hedonists” The Tribe. Since going freelance, I've contributed to the likes of Broadcast, Total Content + Media, Action TV, Off The Telly, Action Network, TV Scoop and The Custard TV.

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