This Blackberry photo doesn’t do it justice. Democratic Senate candidate Jeff Greene has sent voters across Florida an 8-page mailing — more of a booklet, really, that opens up into a poster — as slickly produced and substantial as any high-end corporate brochure. What else would you expect from a billionaire willing to spend “whatever it takes”? Continue reading here.
Here’s a description of the mailer from my colleague at The Reid Report.
So what’d I get? A giant mail piece, 8.5″ x 11″ folded, on recyclable cardstock, which opens book-wise to 11″x17″, and then opens top to bottom to about 17″ wide by about 21″ tall. Having printed complicated-ish pieces for client, I can tell you printing and mailing something that size ain’t cheap. If Greene just covered the registered Democrats in Broward and Palm Beach, that’s 914,771 potential households. Just for fun, I went on a random printing site and punched in their maximum order — 100,000 copies — of the largest pieces they had: an 11″x17″ folded cardstock piece, full color, which would essentially be half the size of Greene’s piece. Printing 100,000 copies of my spec piece would cost about $38,000. Printing an 18″ x 24″ poster, roughly the size of Greene’s mailer fully opened, not even on cardstock but just on regular glossy poster paper, would cost $28,000, not including the cost to fold, and mail, or sales tax. Now, let’s multiply the lower number, $28,000, by 8 (instead of 9, to give us a discount for printing bulk — that’s not really the way the discount works, but we’re just playing around so roll with me…) and you get $224,000 to send my 914,000-odd pieces to two counties worth of Democrats. (Of course, you wouldn’t mail to all of them, it would be much more targeted than that, but you get the point — this guy’s spending a shitload of money…)
Here’s what the art looks like: