Nearly four months after it was submitted to parliament, the evaluation report of the Oui Pub system was posted online on January 10 on the website of the Ministry of Ecological Transition. Initiated in 2021 following the adoption of article 21 of the “Climate and Resilience” law, this system has been tested since 2022 in fourteen areas in France, offering residents wishing to receive printed advertising without an address (IPSA) d affix a Yes Pub sticker to their mailboxes. After two years of experimentation, the results ultimately seem quite mixed.
The inhabitants rather for… professionals rather against
As for the residents of the areas affected by the test, around half of them were aware of the experiment in progress. The report notes, however, that the way to obtain the Oui Pub sticker “remained poorly known by those interested who had not yet affixed it.“If the quantity of IPSA decreased significantly in the areas tested (-48% on average of the tonnage of paper waste collected), certain residents who affixed the Oui Pub sticker regretted a reduction in leaflets received, certain advertisers having decided to stop or restrict their distribution generally to the entire area.
Always remaining very attached to promotional offers, approximately 90% of residents surveyed continued to find out about promotions in the absence of a prospectus, mainly by referring to in-store information. In the end, however, 44% of residents in the test areas said they were in favor of a generalization of Yes Pub throughout the territory, compared to 30% who were undecided and 9% who were dissatisfied. A sound of bells that we don’t really find among professionals…
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And 90% of pilot territories have a very favorable perception or favorable to the experiment and 89% are in favor of an extension and perpetuation of the Oui Pub system, the destruction of jobs and the replacement of printed advertisements by digital advertisements are the main negative impacts highlighted Before.
The report notes that, despite several reminders, few advertisers provided information to evaluate the experiment. Feedback too few to be reliable which motivated the authors of the report to carry out qualitative interviews.
-Difficulties for SMEs in peri-urban and rural areas
If the large food stores have not reported any difficulties linked to the Oui Pub system – having often anticipated with other levers, digital in particular – the toy sector has highlighted the importance of its paper catalogs (which represent 60 to 70% of the brands’ communication budgets), recalling that addressed distribution would be difficult to achieve due to the additional costs involved.
But it is the SMEs in peri-urban and rural areas, great fans of IPSAs to make themselves known and often not having yet implemented new communication strategies, which appear to be the most negatively affected by the Oui Pub system, recognizes the report, which also relays a study by Ademe. The latter compared the environmental impact of advertising campaigns via print distribution versus those distributed digitally.
Not necessarily less polluting
It turns out that “these impacts are differently distributed between paper and digital communications and it is therefore not possible to draw a conclusion on a preferred medium from an environmental point of view due to numerous variables, relating to the communication medium but also its design and use. use made by the final consumer.“In other words, as the conclusion of the report underlines, the evaluation of the experimentation of the Oui Pub system does not allow any conclusion to be drawn”that less use of paper and increased use of digital technology would be less polluting“, write the authors who call for the implementation of sobriety policies and the generalization of eco-design practices.
The Circle of Allieswhich brings together different professional federations linked to printed advertising and paper, reacted to the publication of the report in a press release, emphasizing that this report “does not allow reliable and objective conclusions to be drawn, without real consideration of socio-economic impacts“. He recalls that the generalization of this device “would destroy, without environmental justification, an economic sector with nearly 60,000 direct jobs“.
As the report also recalled, the two main IPSA distributors in France, Médiaposte (subsidiary of the La Poste group) and Milee (Hopps group) have already been faced with significant difficulties, not only linked to the Oui Pub system of course but resulting from the accelerated shift to digital since the health crisis. If Mediapost had to carry out a major restructuring to compensate for the decline in IPSA, which still represents 78% of its activity, Milee did not resist: the Hopps group was put into liquidation last October.
