Two million mistakes

So, a marketing agency has been fired because of innacuracy in the statistics it used in its mailings. According to the report, 2m out of 184m of the letters mailed in the last few years, have been 'wrong'.

You could argue that this is a special case, because it involves the BBC, which has become supremely sensitive to any allegations of impropriety after various episodes of phone-vote rigging and lapses in editorial standards.

Or you could look at the absolute numbers, and say two million letters with avoidable errors constitutes a great deal of damage to public trust.

Or look again, and see that the whole story is based on one complaint to a national newspaper, a newspaper which had already embarked on a campaign against the BBC. And the complaint was triggered by the receipt by one person of duplicate mailings which carried different statistics.

So actually the _real_ mistake was to mail the duplicate, with different data.

How much do you trust the process you use to ensure you only mail people once? Do you think you need to understand it a little better?


photo: www.ClownInsurance.co.uk (yes, really)