Last week the Daily Mail launched a large campaign to ban plastic bags in the UK.
Now it pains me to say this, but for once I’m in agreement with the Daily Mail. I usually read the paper just to discover what I shouldn’t be thinking, rather than what I should, but this is a campaign that, for once, is spot on.
But not wanting to let the Daily Mail off the hook, I had a little think about their contribution to the UK’s rubbish mountain and I thought about CDs & DVDs.
The Daily Mail and Mail On Sunday, you may have noticed, are quite keen on giving away CDs and DVDs to promote their newspapers.
Now, I know that many of the titles do this, but the Mail has the largest marketing budget of all the UK newspapers.
In fact, the Daily Mail and Mail On Sunday have been recognised as the largest buyer and distributor of silver discs in the whole of Europe. Yup, more than the likes of HMV and Amazon.
And, pray tell, what do most people do with these free CDs or DVDs? Well, many probably go onto a shelf to gather dust, while many tens of thousands go straight into the bin – creating yet more landfill.
Anyone who heard the infamous Prince album giveaway last year would have probably decided that was the best thing for it, once they’d heard the whole thing through.
And this is where the Daily Mail’s ‘holier than thou’ attitude falls down, in my eyes. Just imagine the amount of rubbish they produce with all these bloody DVDs they give away.
I mean who seriously buys any paper simply for the freebie? With the odd exception of the Prince album, do they really have that much of an impact on sales?
Clearly they do, otherwise the papers wouldn’t keep ‘flogging’ them, but there must come a point where they’ll run out of appropriate films or TV shows to sell.
So this is a plea. Please stop giving away crap with your newspaper that most people simply chuck in the bin and think about the sort of freebies you accompany with your product.
It takes more than one crusading bandwagon-jumping campaign to become a ‘green’ newspaper.
