I prepared your “No Junk Mail Please” to the postal carrier and put it on the outdoors mailbox in plain view. Today, I found it stuffed in the mail box along with the junkmail. Any other ideas?

Some carriers are obviously resentful of this campaign, since it will impact their incomes, and possibly their jobs, in the future. I’m not saying this is the case with your carrier, for he may simply have given the piece of paper short shrift, thinking it was someone else’s flyer and jammed it back in the box with his.

We collect and deliver letters. If you want your postman to take the campaign letter, enclose it in an envelope, address it to the Postmaster of your city and put a stamp on the letter. Most carriers will pick up outgoing mail from residences, provided it is prominently displayed at the mail box.

I find the people behind this campaign very interesting. They found an obscure policy in Canada Post’s advertising business and are using it to further their own companies.
If you take the time to read what they’re all about, you’ll notice they themselves are in the advertising game.

I quote a few parts of their websites.

“Let us take care of your design and print management so you can spend more time on your business. We have a great network of printers to help take care of a wide array of projects”

“Empower media buyers to use math-based decision-making
Reduce costs by distributing flyers where it’s profitable based on advertising to sales ratio
Reduce paper and contribute to your Green Policy.
Strategically transition from mass advertising into other media
Take a pro-active approach to waste reduction prior to imposed regulations”

“Provide insight into customer geo-demographics for acquisition and retention strategies
Use the knowledge for customer centricity initiatives
Use the knowledge to develop relevant community marketing initiatives
Visualize what areas drive sales and concentrate marketing efforts accordingly
Determine optimal placement for new stores or relocations”

“EcoEco provides marketing strategies for your triple bottom line:
Reveal the 50% of your advertising expenditures that are most effective
Identify the 30% of your customers driving 70% of your sales (and potentially 100% of your profits!)
Calculate your carbon footprint for your Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) strategy”

I could sit here all day and show the flaws in each of these quotes, suffice to say the ideas they suggest do not in any way apply to the small business proprietors that use Canada Post.

99% of Canada Post advertising clients are small business owners not the big corporations. Too even suggest they should use the expertise of these three companies is ludicrous. They already know the exact areas they need to target for their business.
Canada Post offers delivery to very specific areas based on the postal code and as such the local real estate agent or pizza guy is smart enough to know where his flyers should be delivered, he sure doesn’t need to pay someone to tell him.

The big corporations have invested millions in marketing strategies and these people come along and say they’re all doing it wrong?

People who don’t want advertising usually don’t care about the environment and use it as a sorry excuse. Sounds good so use it.

Most companies gain a foothold in their prospective business area by showing competence not by attacking the experts who they say don’t know what they’re doing.

I’ll end my post by quoting the owner of one of the companies behind this campaign who when someone made the comment of non profit agencies(charities) being hurt by this campaign stated the following
“FYI - we would be HAPPY to assitt non-profits in increasing the effectiveness of their advertising dollars!! (as if they don’t already have expert marketing people advise them)

Funny how she spelled assist wrong.

After we rid the world of all the unaddressed ad mail, and when companies start getting hold of mailing lists and addressing all their ad mail, do we then campaign against addressed mail? Perhaps a Blue Dot Campaign. “Absolutely no Mail Wanted”!

Hi; Our postman and Canada Post are very supportive of our red dot effort. Almost all residents of our apartment building are going for it and we printed out the red dots on sticky label paper to go inside the mail boxes for any delivery person to see when they stack the boxes from inside. The Post office even sends participants a nice letter of acknowledgement.
HOWEVER, the postman suggests that this effort does not save any trees and is ineffective inasmuch as the same number of junk mail is being printed and delivered to the post office. It’s the advertisers who need to be told that their junk mail doesn’t get to the recipients. No wonder the post office goes along with the red dot campaign since they get paid one way or another - wherever the junk mail ultimately get to the garbage.
Ernie Geisel, Hamilton

Hi Mama,

Hmmmm . . . . pidgeon hole style mailboxes . . maybe you mean Community Mail Boxes? On these front loading panels, the carrier opens the front of the panel, which holds all the individual doors to the customer’s mailboxes. Therefore, when that panel door is open, he/she will not be seeing your red dot. The red dot needs to go on the inside front edge of your mail box. Carriers don’t pay a lot of attention to what may be lying inside the box neither, as many people fail to collect their mail daily.

Then again, maybe you have the panel boxes that are accessed by the carrier from the top, as used in many apartment buildings. With this style of panel, the front of the box is still visible to the carrier, if it is up high. Dot on the outside top of the door here. If they are waist level or lower, then the dot should go inside on the back of your box up near the top.

There are also apartments that have mailrooms, where the carrier goes into a secured room behind the panels and sorts from the rear. In this case the red dot needs to be at the back of your box so the carrier can see it. I have encountered people who thought we opened every individual mailbox door to put the mail in! So, it is most important that you know how YOUR boxes are delivered to, so that your placement of the red dot is most visible to the carrier WHILE he is sorting the mail.

As far as the red dot campaign letter goes, put it in an envelope, address it to the Postmaster of your city and put it in the outgoing mail box and, try to be a little more sensitive about what you are putting in that outgoing mailbox too. By stuffing your unwanted junk in that box, you may clog it for other people that have real mail to put in there. It’s an ignorant response really and doesn’t achieve anything because your addressed admail (the junk with your name) is NOT returned to the sender. It is shredded at the post office because the sender of that type of mail has not paid sufficient postage for that item to get a return service. The best way to avoid getting this type of mail is to not allow your name to get on multiple mailing lists. You should specify that you do not wish to receive mailings from a business any time you are giving them your name and address. Many magazines sell their mailing lists to others. This is how this stuff proliferates. Reader’s Digest is one of the worst for selling mail lists. TV Guide was another, but it is gone now.

I hope this helps you get your junk mail concerns under control.