www.nickhodge.com

Dear Nor­ris Carter (Gen­eral Man­ager, Loy­alty Pro­grams, Qantas) and Pier­ric Beck­ert (Man­aging Dir­ector, Amer­ican Express)

Note with interest that you have sent me a fake/promotional credit card in the mail. Obvi­ously as a dir­ect mail cam­paign to attempt to get me to use your products: Qantas and AMEX respectively.

How many trees did you kill to send this piece of dir­ect mail out? Not to say the envir­on­mental dam­age in the plastics in the fake card.

Yes, I have said it is OK to send me dir­ect mail when I signed up for AMEX some years ago — but recall­ing hav­ing said “no more dir­ect mail” with either of your organ­isa­tions in the recent 2 years. (see pre­vi­ous post on this mat­ter)

I am expect­ing someone to call me at home, on my unlis­ted phone num­ber, between the hours of 6pm and 8pm some­time dur­ing the week com­men­cing 1^st May telling me the addi­tional bene­fits of the card and why I should spend AU$395 for an AU$100,000 (sub­ject to credit approval cri­teria). I will politely point them to this blog post.

Again I repeat: I use your products often. But now you are just pes­ter­ing me for no reason. Your data­bases will show I have been “sold up” or “cross sold” to exactly zero AMEX products. Zero. I am now cost­ing you more than you make from me.

Time to move on in your mar­ket­ing cam­paigns, guys. Dir­ect mail is old school.

Nick