Canada Post Launches Fetch

Canada Post is about to launch Fetch. The site is now live at www.fetch4.info.

There was a brief Globetechnology article about the fact that Fetch is being piloted in Calgary (which is somewhat unusual).

This quote from the article does a good job of explaining the service at a very high level.

“The Fetch service allows a user to set up an account with Canada Post, and input personal contact information in confidence. When users see an advertisement from a company participating in Fetch, they request that information be sent to that on-line account, either by entering a text message on a cellphone, or through an interactive voice system.

Advertisers would pay only when a consumer requests one of their offers, and individuals would pay nothing for the service.”

Congrats to Warren and Tim for getting this off the ground after a huge amount of internal work.

It will be very interesting to see how this turns out. My guess is it will be a fundamentally new way of protecting consumer privacy while letting marketing through the veil, or it will be a flop. I doubt there is a half-way for this type of model. I’m hoping for the former as I like the idea of bringing greater interactivity to the offline environment.