Do the French still want to receive flyers in their mailboxes? Since spring 2022, an experiment of the “Oui pub” device has been carried out in about fifteen communities. According to early results, most households have opted out of receiving print advertising. The placement rate of the “Yes pub” tag is between 20% and 30% in eight pilot territories and no more than 10% in another five territories, says Ademe, which is experimenting with the device.
Those who do not want to receive flyers are now forced to stick a “Stop pub” sticker on their mailbox. The “Oui pub” device wants to reverse the logic: it is those who wish to receive brochures who must clearly indicate it in their mailbox and, in the absence of any indication, no advertisement can be slipped in the middle of the mail. The climate and resilience law, adopted in 2021, provides for an experiment in fourteen French territories for three years, until May 2025.
766,000 tons in 2021
The goal is to reduce the huge amount of paper waste that is thrown away every year: 766,000 tons of unaddressed forms were still being delivered to mailboxes in 2021. Ademe notes the first “encouraging” results in this field: in the agglomeration In Agen , one of the pilot areas, the weight of print advertising in selective collection went from 64.4 tons before the experiment to 8 tons in January 2023. In Libournais, in the Gironde, it went from 106 tons to 23 tons.
But, Ademe qualifies, these first results must be “still taken with caution”, evoking the recent start-up of the “Oui pub” or the successive statements by the large distributors announcing a sharp reduction or the disappearance of their brochures. The rate of placement of the “Oui pub” sticker thus increased in more than half of the pilot territories between October 2022, the date of a previous count, and February 2023. We will have to wait for the end of the experiment to draw definitive conclusions, specifies the public agency.
it’s not the end yet
Because prospects are far from having said their last word. If several big brands have announced that they want to reduce volumes, or even completely eliminate them like Cora or Leclerc, they are far from gone. The brochure continues to be a heavyweight in promotional communication, streamlined rather than eliminated, as evidenced by the relative success of “Stop pub” whose attachment rate did not exceed 20%. The specialist company Milee (ex-Adrexo) even recently launched its own medium dedicated to brochures, called “150 euros”.
Source: BFM TV
