Quick Printing

There is absolutely no question that personalized marketing is here to stay. The technology that puts VDP within reach has the potential to revolutionize the printing industry. So before you read this, please understand that I’m not calling the industry’s new baby ugly. VDP is only one small, and comparatively benign, part of a much larger trend.

That said, listening to the On Demand keynote by David Pogue, the personal technology columnist for the New York Times, gave me a bit of a chill. Pogue focused on the benefits of personalized marketing. He said that soon we’ll be able to receive an online newspaper that is totally customized to our interests. It will have feature articles about subjects that interest us and ads for products that we’ve indicated a preference for somewhere along the line. He has a musical background and also talked about the growing popularity of downloading, which is now the preferred method for acquiring music. We no longer have to buy the whole CD; we can just download the songs we like.

That sounds pretty cool on the surface, and there is certainly a place for such services, but there is also a real danger in this move toward narrowing our focus so completely. Think of the missed opportunities.

Using music as an example, did you ever buy an album or CD back in the “old days” and fall in love with a track that was buried somewhere in the middle? A song that never got a moment’s notice on radio, but that spoke to you in a very personal way? It was even more special because you discovered it on your own.

You’ve probably picked up a magazine or newspaper, maybe even a copy of Quick Printing, and read an article or seen an ad that piqued your interest. Maybe it led you to pursue a new avenue of business, study, or recreation that you wouldn’t have sought out on your own. Maybe it helped you see the other side of an issue, or amused you, or just made you stop and think. If we limit ourselves only to what we already know, we deprive ourselves of new ideas that can inspire us and broaden our horizons—that help us grow.

Extreme personalization, in essence, narrows our world view, our scope of thought, and our opportunities. Who would you be today if you had chosen only to continue reading and experiencing the things you enjoyed as a teenager or college student? In a world that seems to become a little more polarized with each passing day, total personalization becomes another tool of separation. This technology has the power to limit not only who we are today, but also our potential for tomorrow. And the genie is already out of the bottle.