Scheme Evaluation Card
In Brief
Recommendation: (details)
This scheme represents alarming evidence of both the underfunding of sports in Irish primary schools and just how easy it is to gain commercial leverage in schools. We reject this incentive scheme as a cynical exercise designed to generate immediate sales for Star Newspapers as they launch their new product.
|
Irish Daily Star/Nike : Biggest Sports Giveaway
Name:
Ireland’s Biggest Sports Giveaway Ever.
Sponsor:
Irish Daily Star and Nike.
Objective:
“to give all primary schools an opportunity to participate in the biggest schools sports giveaway ever in Ireland.”
Classification:
Incentive Scheme.
Year: 2004
Materials: [top]
Schools received (unsolicited) a letter from telling them of this incentive scheme offering a Nike football kit in exchange for 250 mastheads from the Irish Daily Star. The registration form and list of registered schools was published in the same newspaper and was endorsed by Irish footballer Robbie Keane.
Comments: [top]
In 2004 Star Newspapers launched their new Sunday edition. To coincide with this, 500 primary schools were sought to register for the Nike “giveaway”. Within 10 days the list of registered schools, from Cork to Carndonagh and representing every county in Ireland, appeared in the Star and the collecting began. Schools had just three weeks to collect the 250 mastheads which “must contain Irish Daily Star on Sunday mastheads from the 8th and 15th February editions”. Schools successful in collecting sufficient Star mastheads received a branded Nike football kit in exchange for proof of purchase.
Recommendation: [top]
This scheme represents alarming evidence of both the underfunding of sports in Irish primary schools and just how easy it is to gain commercial leverage in schools. We reject this incentive scheme as a cynical exercise designed to generate immediate sales for Star Newspapers as they launch their new product.
| |
High |
Fair |
Low |
Curricular
Relevance |
|
|
|
Logo/Brand
Presence |
|
|
|
Influence
on Spending
|
|
|
|
The scheme appears to pressurise schools and parents into advertising, purchasing and collecting newspaper mastheads in return for branded sportswear. It is lamentable that almost 1/6 of all Irish primary schools would feel the need to enter such a commercial promotion in the year after the Department of Education and Science had discontinued the PE equipment grant to schools. School sports should be adequately resourced and not have to turn to promoting tabloid newspapers in order to obtain basic equipment.
“principals in primary schools were generally dissatisfied with the facilities for sport in their schools: two-thirds said they were ‘not at all adequate’…. In line with this, two-thirds of principals believed that their school needed major investment in sports facilities….”
Tony Fahey, Liam Delaney and Brenda Gannon, School Children And Sport In Ireland (Dublin: ESRI, 2005), 61.
|
