Social Media: An Origin Theory

People still read printed magazines, to some extent. And you'll still find printed Business Reply Cards between their pages.

BRCs are direct response advertisements for everything from magazine renewals to advertisers' products and services. I have no idea how effective they are today, but in their heyday, they were linchpins of my direct response advertising campaigns.

They weren’t cheap, either: adding a BRC to a full-page color ad was the same cost as an additional full-page black and white ad – plus, we had to pay the physical production costs of the BRCs: design, printing, and shipping to the publication. We also paid the postage for the cards as they were returned to us.

Do people still hate them? Back in my day, the humble BRC fueled the rage of many a magazine reader, judging from the feedback I received. And I agree, they could be annoying: blow-in cards would fall to the floor as the magazines were picked up, and bound-in cards kept the the publication from lying flat.

A boss of mine routinely had her secretary flip through every magazine that came in the mail to remove all the BRCs before she would read them.

BRCs, however, were unquestionably effective to advertisers like me. Every day, I received them in the mail as leads for my company’s tax software product. I would log each card into CRM along with a publication source entry, and then hand carry them to the inside sales team for follow up.

Every day, however, mixed into the batch of BRC "leads," were silent protests. Some people viewed BRCs as a form of cost-free self expression. They would express themselves by removing BRCs from a magazine and dropping them into the mail, most often without making a mark on them. This would force the advertiser to pay postage for every card returned. (I had to maintain a credit balance with the post office that was dinged for each BRC return.)

While the number of leads I received from day to day varied quite a bit, a working day never passed without me receiving at least four to six silent protest cards in the mail.

It didn’t end there. Some readers took advantage of the communication platform my company funded for them by putting messages onto our BRCs. These ranged from political statements to expressions of outrage and anger to … just weird stuff.

After receiving them for a while, I began gathering the "protest cards," and eventually began mounting them into a three-ring binder -- which I recently unearthed from a box stored in my garage.

What strikes me about them today, is that BRC messages were anonymous (aside from the postmark, which only indicated date and municipality). Looking back at them now, they appear as ancestors of tweets or X's or other social media posts. They're anonymous and delivered at no cost. They're an earlier generation's way of expressing emotion with no potential consequence. Empowerment without blowback.

Copied below are a few of the BRCs I received in the mail decades ago. They express anger, whimsy, creativity, and other emotions. Much as today's social media posts and replies do as well. I hope you enjoy them.