The Green Preference Service (GPS) was a failed attempt to get people to switch from physical to digital junk mail. I first heard about the service in June 2011, when the company's CEO, Paul Anderson, contacted me. He told me he was a "converter marketing professional" and that the GPS was an improved version of the MPS. He also said the DMA was mightily impressed with the service he had set up — they had apparently exclaimed: "why didn't we think of this?".

The website he was promoting was greenpreferenceservice.com. I later learnt that the GPS used a second domain: gpsonline.org.uk. I want to start with the latter domain, as the website pre-dates the former and because it was a little… suspect. The website was a complete rip-off of the MPS website (mpsonline.org.uk). It shamelessly copied and pasted large chunks of copy.

To illustrate, this is what the home page of MPS said at the time:

With UK consumers generating over £25 billion worth of postal sales per year, it's fair to say the majority welcome the information and special offers they receive by post. However, it's also understandable why some people might take a different view. The MPS is here to make your choice known — so you get the mail you want and need.

And this is what the GPS's home page said:

With UK consumers generating over £25 billion worth of postal sales per year, it's fair to say the majority welcome the information and special offers they receive by post. However, it's also understandable why some people are concerned over the environmental impact. The GPS is here to make your choice to be GREEN known — so you get the mail you want and need in a green environmentally friendly way.

And, this is how the MPS home page discouraged people from signing up to the MPS:

A Few Facts to Consider before you Decide…

Since 1990, Direct Mail's popularity has doubled, with more companies and charities staying in touch by post.

For companies, it's a good way to tell customers and prospects about new products, services and special offers that can save them money.

For charities, it's an economical way to raise awareness and much needed support.

And for consumers, Direct Mail is a convenient way to shop from home… to take their time and make good decisions without pressure, and to get the products they want and need — often at less than they'd pay in shops.

You would think the GPS wouldn't plagiarise that text but they did:

A Few Facts to Consider before you Decide…

Since 1990, Direct Mail's popularity has doubled, with more companies and charities staying in touch by post. Registering with GPS will allow these communications to become environmentally sustainable and more cost effective.

For companies, email is a more effective way to tell customers and prospects about new products, services and special offers that can save them money.

For charities, it's a more economical way to raise awareness and much needed support.

And for consumers, email is a more convenient way to shop from home… to take their time and make good decisions without pressure, and to get the products they want and need — often at less than they'd pay in shops.

The MPS website is of course run by the DMA. I think the DMA's "why didn't we think of this" comment might have been sarcastic! Or, perhaps Anderson tried to convince the DMA that they should replace the MPS website with his copy. I would have asked him had I been aware of the website, as it is rather curious.

Taking a tour

The GPS even copied menu items such as Take a tour, which on the MPS website shows a bunch of slides explaining how the MPS works. The GPS used the page to explain how its service worked in three paragraphs of text:

Companies use mailing lists to target prospects and customers for services, we will request these companies to match their lists against GPS (Green Preference Service).

When a matched (sic) is found, the company knows that you would prefer to receive the mailing in the form of an email. Its (sic) saves the company money and is (sic) environmentally friendly to send a email instead of a piece of physical mail.

When they send an email, it will be sent to a Green Preference email address, this can be set to automatically forward to your everyday email box. This process allows you to know which emails have been received as a result of joining GPS, and more importantly allows us to enforce a SPAM control technology that enables us to guarantee that no spam will be received as a result of joining.

The How to complain page — another navigation item lifted from the MPS website — explained what you could do if you continued to receive dead tree advertising:

If you still receive physical unsolicited mailings despite your registration with the Green Preference Service please email us and write to the companies concerned and make them aware of that (sic) you have joined GPS to show your preference for a green and sustainable future.

We will also write to the companies concerned and ask for an explanation as to why they are ignoring their customers (sic) desire for a green and sustainable future.

Email your complaints to: complaints@gpsonline.org.uk

The paragraph about asking senders for an explanation was again taken from the MPS website. It is an interesting variation on the original text. If you complain to the MPS, the DMA asks the sender for an explanation if the sender is a member of the DMA (as only DMA members are required to use the MPS suppression file). The GPS obviously was a commercial scheme. Not a single junk mailer was required to use the GPS suppression file, and so there was nothing to explain. It sounds like they used complaints about junk mail as an opportunity to sell the GPS.

The second website, and its rapid demise

The second domain was greenpreferenceservice.com. This website was properly launched in the summer of 2011, and I think the website was either a replacement of gpsonline.org.uk or the GPS's "consumer-facing" website. Either way, this was the website where you could sign up to the service, and unlike gpsonline.org.uk it wasn't a rip-off of the MPS website.

During its short existence the website rarely changed. The most interesting change was that they added a "We are a DMA member" logo in September 2011. At around that time I had another chat with Mr Anderson. He was hoping I could refer visitors of this here website to the GPS, or maybe say something nice about the service on my blog. I was mainly curious about his opinion of the junk mail lobby group he had just joined. He spoke very fondly of the DMA, so that instantly ruled out any favours.

The website went offline some time between August 2013 and January 2014 and gpsonline.org.uk was killed off in the second half of 2014. No formal announcement was made and no obituary was written. It is unknown what happened with the personal data of GPS users.

The business model

Essentially, the GPS was another answer to the question that keeps so many marketers awake at night: how do you enable "consumers" to opt out without letting them put a stop to all unsolicited adverts? We first discussed this conundrum when we looked at the Postal Preference Service, which aimed to built a lifestyle database containing the personal details of millions of people — if you know everything about everybody than all adverts become relevant. It's My Post had a slightly more sensible approach. The company made it easier to stop mailings from individual senders, so that people wouldn't have to stop all unsolicited mail by registering with the MPS. Choose Your Mail did the exact opposite; they wanted you to register with MPS and then opt in to receiving specific types of ads. It are all variations on the same the theme, and all the business models failed. The reason is that the conundrum they tried to solve doesn't exist. There was no option to stop all junk mail.

One of the more interesting aspects of the GPS is that it was a direct competitor of the MPS. The main difference between the two services was that the MPS suppresses adverts, while the GPS allowed advertisers to replace physical ads with digital ones. This was supposedly "green" and "convenient" — because who doesn't enjoy receiving adverts via email?

Registering with the service was free. The company's income would come from junk mailers buying the GPS list so that they could send GPS users spam emails instead of physical junk mail. For that business model to work the company needed lots of users — and that never happened. The gpsonline.org.uk website boasted that it expected to have the same number of subscribers as the MPS within two years. I suspect they got no more than a few hundred users, and that is a generous guestimate. By July 2012 — roughly a year after the greenpreferenceservice.com website was launched — the service was left to rot. The last news article on the main GPS website was posted that month, as were the last Facebook and Twitter posts.

The company tried hard to get media attention but it only managed to get a single paragraph in the Metro, on page 48. They had few mates on Facebook and Twitter, and none of them ever liked the company's posts and tweets. There just wasn't any demand for a service that offers to send you spam.

As said, without lots of users it is impossible to sell the service to junk mailers. Converting junk mail to spam isn't as straight forward as you might think. Spam and junk mail are, to use the junk mail industry's jargon, entirely different "channels" — simply scanning a junk mail letter doesn't cut it for the average marketing professional. Plus, junk mailers would have had to re-engineer their junk mail database so that it would include information about GPS users. Unless a service like the GPS offers significant savings no junk mailer would touch it with a bargepole.

A look behind the scenes

I created an account with the GPS in September 2011 (out of professional curiosity). When you first logged into your account you were presented with your GPS mailbox. This is where your junk mail would be delivered to. There was an option to block senders.

The account preferences (called "Master Settings") were more interesting. By default, emails sent to your GPS mailbox would be forwarded to the email address you used to sign up to the service. You could disable that option but you would still receive notifications (at least once per week). So, you couldn't disable all emails and simply let junk mailers send their ads into a black hole. However, I never received any notification. Most likely, that is because there was nothing to be notified of.

Most of the settings were opt-in boxes. By default, you were opted in to receiving adverts in 12 categories. In addition, you could select companies that you wish to continue receiving direct mail from. This effectively encouraged users to opt in to receiving adverts from specific junk mailers, and to add insult to injury you would get paper junk mail.

In other words, the GPS wasn't just about switching from paper to digital junk mail; you would actually end up with more adverts. It is also worth noting the change in tone. The website's home page lured people in with a promise of stopping wasteful junk mail, but once you were logged in the same stuff is called "information" or "direct mail". I think (hope) most users were instantly put off while exploring the "Master Settings".

Also interesting is the option to receive unaddressed junk mail and newspapers via the GPS. It looks like they were hoping to branch out to unaddressed mail as well. Alas, that never happened. The GPS was an amateurish and disingenuous service run by junk mailers who were hoping to make money out of people looking to stop junk mail. Good riddance!