UK consumers who don’t want to return from holiday with mounds of direct mail in their mailboxes will now be able to visit a Web site and opt out of receiving it.
UK consumers who don’t want to return from holiday with mounds of direct mail in their mailboxes will now be able to visit a Web site and opt out of receiving it. What’s interesting is that the new initiative is being developed conjointly by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) and the direct marketing industry itself. DEFRA and the Direct Marketing Association (DMA), says
Business Green, are setting up
a free-to-use website so everyone can opt-out of receiving all types of advertising mail. The website, scheduled to go live next April, is intended to replace the current system, where households have to register on three separate services, the Mailing Preference Service, the Your Choice Preference System and Royal Mail's Door-to-Door opt-out service.
How much direct mail do UK households receive, one may ask? Well:
The average household receives more than 300 items of unaddressed and 77 items of addressed mail a year. In 2009, 80,000 tonnes of direct marketing material were produced, of which almost 80 per cent was recycled, according to Defra.
It’s interesting to see that the DMA itself was involved in this.
Et tu, Brute?
Chief of operations for the DMA, Mike Lordan, said: "We know that many types of advertising mail are welcomed by consumers, such as supermarket discount offers. Of course, untargeted and irrelevant advertising mail is not welcome. It's this we want to eliminate.
"Unwanted mail is an annoyance and an unnecessary cost to business. By cutting this out we will also be helping to improve the environmental performance of the industry."
Meanwhile, companies are increasingly being asked to print their direct ail in recycled or otherwise sustainably produced paper.
I guess this is a bigger issue overseas. Time was, whenever I went out of town for as little as five days, I would need to have my mail held, lest I return to a mailbox full of catalogs and other direct mail. Now...not so much. Even if I go away for 10 days, I barely get enough of anything to even come close to filling the box (and I'm certainly not overburdened by checks...). At least on this side of the Atlantic, the "junk mail" problem seems to be resolving itself of its on accord. Now, e-mail is a whole other issue...
UPDATE: Oh, by the way, I also just came across an item over at
PIWorld, about the latest in banning direct mail stateside. If you thought donotmail.org wasn't ornery enough, now we have 41pounds.org (apparently they have been around for 5 years), which, they claim, "has stopped 5 million pounds of junk mail, saved 44,000 trees from destruction and raised more than $300,000 for environmental organizations." Funny, I would have thought a transition to new and social media would have had more to do with that trend... I don't need to point out the fallacies promoted by organizations like 41pounds.org to anyone in the Going Greenosphere, but are, as the PI editor pointed out, "
example[s] of the misinformation the printing industry must be prepared to counteract."
