BOOKMARK
TEXT SIZE
It has been a long day at work and you have just realized we are only three weeks away from Santa visiting. You also realize that you have not even started your holiday shopping and that you need to get little Brett and Hailey their gifts. The problem is that you don’t even know where to start. The bigger problem is that when you get home your daily newspaper will have tons of suggestions on where to go and what to buy. Welcome to Christmas marketing.
The above scenario is not out of the twilight zone, this was my day yesterday and sure enough when I got home I counted 13 flyers stuffed in my local newspaper. I had 3 jewelry store flyers, 1 power tool flyer, 3 grocery store flyers, 2 toy store flyers, 3 clothing store flyers and even one for a travel agency. Like the trained consumer that I am I started to peruse the selections and quickly decided against any power tools for my offspring, likewise with any piece of jewelry that was reduced to the low price of $499.99. I also quickly tossed aside the clothing store ads as well as the travel agency flyer. It was quickly determined that the grocery stores had nothing that would even come close to passing off as a gift to my children so I was left with the two toy store flyers, then it hit me.
I counted and found that in total I had 42 double sided paper pages of advertisements. I understand the purpose of them and those retailers, especially in this financial climate, need to do whatever they can to bring business to their doors but is this excess waste really required?
We would need to take a look at how much paper a tree produces to just see how much waste is happening. One cord of wood, wood stacked 4 feet by 4 feet by 8 feet, or 128 cubic feet of word generates 90,000 sheets of paper or 2700 copies of a 35 page newspaper. So a community newspaper with a distribution of 50,000 would generate 2.1 million pages just for its 42 pages of flyers. This equates to just over 23 trees for one community newspaper’s flyers. If we take into account just one day’s publication for each of Canada’s newspapers we are talking about 4.6 million newspapers being delivered. In the 4.6 million newspapers, 42 pages of flyers inserted then equate to 2146 trees for retail marketing in just one week.
There are options for this waste and all have their ups and downs. There is radio, television, email, and recycled papers.
Radio advertising is targeted demographically depending on the individual station so you would not see a Golden Oldies station running toy store ads. Radios are not on all the time and even when they being listened to it may not be a time that your advertisement is running. Though more environmentally friendly, retailers normally use radio to augment other advertising.
Television is also targeted demographically and runs into the same viewing issues as radio with one major caveat. Television advertising is much more expensive and this prices some retailers out of this option.
Email advertising gets into another world of problems. SPAM is now considered to be one of the largest pet peeves for the majority of people. Thus SPAM-blocking software does affect how your email advertising campaign works. This is not even touching the issue that you need your target audience to agree to receive your emails so that you are not in contravention of Federal or State SPAM laws.
So we end back at paper but this time recycled. Some newspapers are moving to recycled paper and this helps the environment immensely but what else can be done. Some people put up do not deliver signs or enroll with an organization that helps to block unwanted delivered advertisements but this is a personal choice.
Personally right now I choose to deal with it my own way and that is to use the flyers for useful purposes. Excuse me while I put the flyers under my daughter’s easel, she is learning to paint.
Courtesy of GLOBE-Net.
Subscribe to this comment's feed