I work for the Royal mail. I somewhat like my job, although as any job has its ups and downs, we’re very much on a down right now, but it’s still not a bad job. Sometimes it can get a bit frustrating, and right around now is one of those times.
In my country, the beautiful, flat, boring country of the Netherlands, we have stickers you can put on your mailbox.
No, no unaddressed advertisement Yes, door to door papers.
Basically, they tell people who deliver flyers and whatnot that they should skip your house. YOu don’t want their advertising shoved down your throat. And that’s a pretty good idea in theory. And it seemed to work for a while. But one thing I’ve been seeing a lot is a workaround.
There’s a company selling fiber internet in our town. And they’ve got a massive campaign going around trying to get people to buy into it. Here’s the thing right, the internet cables aren’t actually there yet. So they need to get enough people to buy into it ahead of time so they can get the green light on actually putting down the internet. And to do this they need people to know about it. And looking at the ridiculous amount of advertisements going around, I don’t think it’s going well enough.
Because in the past two or three months I’ve had to deliver numerous of their advertisements. And the way they get around these no/no stickers that people have is very infuriating and in my opinion should be banned. They just address a letter to “the people living on Fakestreet 123” and consider it addressed mail. So not only do people with these stickers get flyers and what not they specifically said they do not want, I have to deal with delivering them. And because it just takes a list of addresses and sends one to everyone they can find, you end up with a ton of leftovers for addresses that don’t actually exist, no longer have a mailbox etc.
It just becomes a pain for everyone involved.
So I just wanted to put out this little thing that’s on my mind. I mentioned on twitter that the post planned for today will go up tomorrow instead because I’m tired right now. This is what you get instead, I can only apologize.
All jokes aside, I hope people agree with me that this is bad practice. It just got on my nerves today so I wanted to rant about it a little bit. Let me know if you have any thoughts on this topic or if my years of failing marketing courses have just made me unreasonably bitter towards any form of advertisement. Thanks for reading.
Opal Kaharis 