Taking shape

Coming soon to mailboxes: advertising shaped like a sports car or a stop sign, a hula doll or hamburger. Indeed, almost anything an artist can conceive.

Customized MarketMail debuts Monday, offering advertisers a chance to send material that really shows their products to buyers.

The first mailing, to Southern California, will be simulated boxes of Krispy Kreme doughnuts.

Other designer ads are in the works.

A card showing a shiny new motorcycle, for example, cut into the shape of tone. Or an oval hamburger — lettuce and onions sticking out from the side, a bunch of grapes, a sad-eyed bulldog puppy.

Other coming ads are for a Japanese automaker and a cell phone company, U.S. Postal Service officials said.

It’s a battle for audience attention, said Nick Barranca, the Postal Service’s vice president for new products. Customized MarketMail will allow businesses to make their products stand out.

Even though it’s not cheap or simple, leaders of the direct-mail industry welcome it.

It’s an “exciting new development,” said H. Robert Wientzen, head of the Direct Marketing Association. “There’s no doubt that CMM is the shape of things to come.”

And Tom Becker, president of ShipShapes in Park Forest, Ill., one of the companies designing the ads, praises the idea as an innovative way to reach customers.

With restrictions in the works for telemarketing and spam e-mail, companies are looking for better ways to deliver their messages, Mr. Becker said.

The decision on whether it works, of course, is in the hands of the public.

To help gauge acceptance, at least some of the ads will be coupons.

For example, the simulated box of doughnuts in the first ad, targeting Orange County, Calif., offers recipients a dozen doughnuts for a dime when they buy a dozen and bring in the ad.

If customers bring in lots of the coupons, the advertisers will know it was worth the effort and money.

They will be paying a premium to send the ads.

Advertising mail rates vary according to the size and weight of the envelope but are often lower than the 37-cent first-class rate because businesses receive discounts to presort much of the mail and deliver it to bulk-mail centers or local post offices.

The customized pieces will cost 57.4 cents each to mail — 46 cents for nonprofit organizations — with a minimum of 200 pieces. Pieces cannot be bigger than 12 inches by 15 inches and cannot weigh more than 3.3 ounces.

And because the items can’t be handled by postal-sorting machinery, the sender will have to bring them to the local post offices, where carriers will take them for delivery, or bring them in large envelopes to a bulk-mail center, which will forward them to local offices to be opened and delivered.

Although the postal service wants to encourage creativity, it does have some limits on what can be mailed — for example, nothing “obscene, lewd, filthy, lascivious, vile, indecent” and so forth.

The ads are not preapproved, said marketing specialist Christopher Ashe. An item can be ruled nonmailable and the company can be fined, if a recipient or postal worker complains.