I’ve long been intrigued by the amount of effort, decision making and waste involved in producing the product we universally know as “junk mail”. I’m sure you know the stuff I mean. Those ubiquitous, urging and unsolicited pamphlets that get crammed into our letter boxes with monotonous regularity. The stuff that causes many to erect loud signs over their mail boxes saying 'NO JUNK MAIL". In my case the shining new offerings I sometimes receive are almost invariably thrown straight into the rubbish bin with only the briefest of glances. That leads me to believe junk mail might possibly be one of the most redundant products of our time.
Another way of describing junk mail might be as the analogue equivalent of the digital advertising dumps we also receive on a regular basis from the likes of Facebook, Amazon and Google (FAG!!). Apart from the big three, many of us are also targeted by swathes of other spam which somehow manages to sleaze its way into our email inboxes.
In considering all the complex and elaborate processes that clearly go into creating our largely unwanted hard copy and electronic junk mail, I’m led to wonder what motivations lay behind their production. I’m curious too about where all the unwanted paper eventually ends up? To that end, I will be examining a couple of possible answers to these questions in the story of ** Gillian Junkmail** which follows in the next blog .
As for the fate of all the digital stuff we receive, I’d be willing to bet most of it is turned pretty promptly into digital dust. Not before it leaves long trails of tell-tale data about us in its wake though. This data will eventually be trawled over by algorithm writers in their never ceasing quest to find ever more suckers, I mean buyers. It’s a dog eat dog world out there in the land of Capitalism, but hey ya gotta be in it to win it!!
Despite the apparent lack of general interest in a product which is largely given away free to consumers, the ever expanding and ongoing production of junk mail tends to indicate it must remain a valid and worthy enterprise to pursue. If it weren’t companies, both large and small, would long ago have abandoned the idea of devoting so much of their energy and money towards churning it out. I guess we have to look beyond the actual product and consider it more as one of many tools modern PR, advertising, sales and marketing people have at their disposal to rouse our consumer interests. Junk mail drops are likely a much cheaper promotional alternative than expensive newspaper, magazine or television campaigns. At their heart though, every advertising technique has the aim of driving sales and profits ever upwards. While they continue to be successful in doing that job, it’s reasonable to assume they will be persisted with, even though it is must be quite a difficult task to gauge just how successful or effective any junk mail campaign might be in getting bang for the buck.
Despite a lot of junk mail being promptly disposed of, I don’t wish to suggest it is universally despised. I personally know a number of people who read every single offering they receive, sometimes in minute detail. I can only assume this is done in an attempt to assuage misplaced shopping therapy requirements or some other forms of human aspirational and social need. For some, junk mail is often one of the few interfaces they have with the outside world.
Anyway, that’s enough idle speculation about junk mail’s various social impacts for the moment. It’s time to take a quick look at some of the physical and creative requirements that go into producing the stuff.
Apart from ensuring sufficient stock is on hand and that all relevant legal processes have been duly observed before a campaign begins, most junk mail creation is likely to be kicked off with a bit of strategic thinking and possibly some market analysis. The results would then be used to determine which demographics and locations are to be targeted. The ideas and results from that exercise would then be further developed through a range of creative thinking processes, all with a view of trying to best capture consumer attention. After some healthy debate about style and content, decision makers would usually reach a position where it was possible to make the call on things like which photos or graphics to be used, what writing style should be employed, which fonts to use and what kind of formatting might best capture the consumer’s imagination. Finally a choice would need to be made about what type of paper should be used. Only when this entire complex set of detail had been tinkered and tailored to finality, usually with the aid of computer design programs, would the final draft be settled on. Then it’s time for printing.
Printing the finished junk mail design could be done either in-house or contracted out to a specialist printer, depending on the desired quality and size of the print run. Both options, however, require the combined use of computer power, high tech printers and exotic inks garnered together from all over the planet to complete the task. The paper too, which is probably the chief and most important ingredient of junk mail, is also likely to have travelled many thousands of kilometres from its source before it reaches the printer.
Paper use in the Western World only came to prominence after the Guttenburg printing press promoted a wider embracing of literacy during the early 1400’s. It had long before been known in the Chinese and Arabic worlds, but was mainly used for wrapping things. Prior to the paper’s introduction to Europe, it required the killing of 250 sheep to make sufficient vellum parchment to produce just one hand written copy of the bible.
By the time the Renaissance period got into full swing, mass literacy and a need to better record business contracts and sales records had prompted an ever increasing demand for paper. Paper quickly became so cheap and plentiful that by the 18th century companies had even began printing single use newspapers. A short while later, with the invention of perforated paper, came our much loved product, toilet tissue, and that is a demand that’s not going to go away any time soon. Demand for paper has continued to grow right up until this day, though 2013 was the first year in which the global manufacture of paper finally declined. There are many possible reasons for that, but mostly it’s because digital alternatives are finally catching on.
Paper itself is usually made from the cellulose collected from breaking down organic material These days we get our cellulose mainly from paper pulp and modern chemicals, as well as a lot of recycling (cardboard boxes made in China for computer products can be recycled 6 times before they finally wear out!). In the early days of printing, paper was actually made by soaking cloth in urine. So great did the early demand become that people were known to go out and collect clothing from the corpses of those who’d died on battlefields. Just as well we have so many fast growing softwood trees in the perfect environment of our planet’s temperate zones to meet the hungry demands of today.
I’d like to close this particular blog with a few interesting facts about the folding of paper. The process of doing that is one of exponential growth. That is, with the average paper having thickness of 1/10th of a millimetre, if you fold the paper perfectly in half, it doubles its thickness with each fold. Things get interesting very quickly as the number of folds increases. Folding some paper in half three time will get you to about the thickness of a nail.
Seven folds (the generally accepted maximum that can be done manually) will be about the thickness of a notebook of 128 pages.
If you had a sufficiently large piece of paper and enough energy, 10 folds and the paper will be about the width of a hand.
23 folds will get you to one kilometre.
30 folds will get you to space. Your paper will be now 100km high.
Keep folding it. 42 folds will get you to the Moon, and by the time you got to 51, you would burn in the Sun.
Fast forwarding to 81 folds and your paper will be 127,786 light-years wide, almost as thick as the Andromeda Galaxy!!