Is that a new manga related magazine in your mailbox there? Is it a flier promoting new video game? Is it some kind of funny magazine? Nope – that’s the envelope VeriSign decided to use for their unsolicited mailings this week. I was stunned by the comic book artwork – check it out yourself:
The letter inside had a form you can send in to get a free copy of their security white paper, and top 75 respondents can win the Atari emulator that Wallmart sells for $5 :P
My question is – who is this targeted at? The letter itself is directed at serious IT professionals, and potential customers I guess… The envelope seems to be targeted at the console gaming crowd. Huh? Who came up with this campaign? The marketing people at Verisign need to have their heads checked. This envelope is bizarre!
This came to my house – so I did not mind. But if this came to my workplace it would look very unprofessional in my mailbox or on my desk. I can just picture my boss giving me dirty look and making some half-joking comment about reading comic books on company time :P Usually the crap that gets mailed to me has boring envelopes, or in case of magazines – hardware or some professionally looking graphics on the cover. This is the first cartoony manga like mailing that I got.
Note the wording on the back:
Diabolical internet pirates could be targeting your site.
Didn’t they mean “hackers”? I guess I could understand “Diabolical Internet Hackers” (after all most people use the word hacker incorrectly). but “pirates” just seems to be out of place in that sentence. People have been (mis)using the word pirate for ages now. Was this guy living under a rock or something? What the hell?
It’s clear that these slogans were not written by a techie person. But I would expect a marketing guy to be familiar with the pop culture interpretations of hacker and pirate. Geez…
Very strange envelope….