Token Gestures Cash In On Primary Schools
January 12, 2009 by Joe Fogarty
As the 2009 school year gets underway marketers have lost no time in targeting Irish schools with commercial schemes. Designed to exploit the lack of funding available to schools and maximise sales at a typically lean time of year, these schemes are discriminatory, self-serving and pressurising. The Campaign for Commercial-Free Education condemns advertising promotions which seek to boost profits at the expense of school time and energy.
Irish Daily Mail Free Kits for Kids:
SuperValu Kids in Action:
Back for it’s 4th year, SuperValu’s “Kids in Action” voucher scheme offers a “FREE” basketball to schools who collect €1,570 worth of receipts, a “FREE” gymnastics bench in return for €32,840 worth of shopping and an outdoor hurling set “FREE” to those schools who spend €97,130 in SuperValu. Appeals will be made to parents, relatives and neighbours to direct their shopping as teachers and children take on the role of company salespeople enthusiastically collecting the €10 shopping receipts. A high-profile media campaign accompanies this promotion as SuperValu hope to once more receive €150 million worth of shopping receipts through primary schools and sports clubs. The CCFE have condemned “Kids in Action” as a marketing scam driven by profit and not philanthropy. An evaluation of the scheme can be found on this site by entering “Kids in Action” in the search field.
Irish Daily Mail Free Kits for Kids:
A newcomer to the Irish school “market”, this scheme was run last year in Scotland and offers sports kits in exchange for 400 tokens from the newspaper. Schools, who will have just 12 days to amass their tokens, are advised to “make sure that family and friends are collecting”. The Daily Mail are using an unsolicited mail shot and television advertisements to attract 200 school to participate, ensuring sales of 80,000 over the 12 days of the promotion.
And of course, as we all know, the more newspapers a media outlet can claim to have sold the more attractive it will seem as a place for companies to advertise with. (CCFE fails to see the educational value of this.)
