1999 Media Outreach Summary

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Articles In Other Publications

• Diversions (Central Contra Costa Solid Waste Authority Newsletter)
• LAG Connection (Los Altos Garbage Company Newsletter)
• South Valley Connection (South Valley Disposal Newsletter)
• Waste News

Television

Public Service Announcements

Paid Advertising (95 commercials)

• KGO TV (48 commercials)
• KTVU TV (25 commercials)
• Lifetime and Bay TV Cable (80 commercials in 11 regional zones-880 commercials)

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Radio

Paid Advertising (727 commercials plus bonus spots)

• K101/KNEW FM (66 commercials each)
• KBAY 100.3 (63 commercials)
• KCBS 740 AM (30 commercials)
• KGO 810 AM/KSFO 560 (42 commercials each)
• KOIT 96.5 FM /1260 AM (52 commercials each)
• KUIC 95.3 (52 commercials)
• KFOG/KFFG (52 commercials)
• KISQ (74 commercials)
• KEZR (64 commercials)
• KBRG Spanish (62 commercials)

The following supplemented the radio ads listed above:

Trash Talk Program on KCBS twice each week, K101 Electronic Billboard and K101 Listener Line for one week, K101 Embarcadero Center Rink Promotion, Pre-Super Bowl Party at Hyatt, SF Promotion, rotating sponsorships on KGO, KBAY, KUIC, and KISQ.

Radio News Coverage

• KCBS 740 AM
• KVON/KVYN

Radio Public Service Announcements

• KBWB
• KCBS 740 AM
• KDFC
• KZSF
• KOIT

Other Outreach Efforts

The media campaign also included a press event at the Rockridge Safeway Store at 5130 51st Street in Oakland on Thursday, February 4, 1999. The two-hour event featured fourth-grade students from the Park Day Elementary School wearing costumes and demonstrating how to make a no-waste lunch in an effort to educate their peers and adults about the concepts behind “Save Money and the Environment Too.”

Dan Eaton, Chair of the CIWMB, presented the class with the first State award for the campaign. The City of Oakland presented the two fourth-grade classes with an award for implementing a waste-free Friday program in the school. The event was well attended by local government officials and Oakland shoppers. Two television stations (KTOP and KPST channel 66), KCBS radio, and the Oakland Tribune attended the event.

In-Store Materials

In-store materials focused on shopping bags with the campaign messages. Four supermarket chains provided approximately four million shopping bags. In addition, Safeway printed the campaign messages on 797,000 milk cartons. Nob Hill Markets distributed 2,400 bag stuffers with campaign messages in English and Spanish, and Cala Foods ran 500,000 ads for the campaign in their coupon books. In the 1997 campaign, each county handled the staffing of their respective supermarkets differently.

• Two counties (Alameda and Solano) hired nonprofit organizations to perform supermarket setup and maintenance. The Solano County nonprofit organization was also responsible for recruitment of supermarkets.
• Two counties (San Francisco and Santa Clara) hired a volunteer coordinator to recruit volunteers to perform supermarket setup and maintenance. San Francisco also used city staff as volunteers.
• Four counties (Contra Costa, Napa, San Mateo, and Sonoma) used a combination of volunteers and city and county staff to perform supermarket setup and maintenance. (The cities of Davis and Winters in Yolo County also participated in the campaign. These cities also recruited volunteers and used city staff to perform supermarket setup and maintenance.)
• One county (Marin) provided no support to the campaign. The program coordinator took on the
  responsibility of supermarket setup and maintenance.

Coupons and Certificates

For the first two years of the campaign, coupons and certificates were offered for a variety of products and services to attract attention to the campaign. Coupons were offered for oil changes, batteries, and a cloth diaper hamper and diaper covers. In 1996, one $500 certificate for groceries was offered in each of the nine original counties, sponsored by the Steel Recycling Institute. In addition, fifty $100 certificates were given away in a random drawing from all entry forms received during the campaign, sponsored in part by Safeway. In addition, $101 grocery certificates were given away in 1996 as part of live radio reports from a Safeway store in San Jose by K101.

This aspect of the campaign was dropped in subsequent years because only 0.6 percent of shoppers entered these contests or redeemed their coupons. The most interest was found in the coupons for Eveready Rechargeable Batteries. Customers redeemed an estimated 1,500 battery coupons.

Hotline

From 1996 to 1998, Pacific Bell Directory provided the use of their regional telephone book recycling hotline (1-800-953-4400). A message was recorded and placed on all area code and prefix combinations in the San Francisco Bay Area (see sample hotline message below). The hotline script was generally active for two months, beginning in January. Having a 1-800 hotline allowed the campaign to include the hotline number on outreach materials, including the paid television and radio commercials, television and radio public service announcements, newspaper advertisements and articles, and the printed shopping bags.

Starting 1998, the same hotline script was placed on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s 1-800 CLEANUP hotline. The advantage of using the U.S. EPA’s hotline was its associated web site; also, the phone message and the web page are active year round. The web site includes a page with the campaign messages and hints for saving money while protecting the environment. From 1999 on, the 1-800 CLEANUP hotline was used exclusively.

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Campaign Information

1999 Campaign Funding

The 1999 campaign budget included $203,850 in direct financial contributions. An additional $175,000 of in-kind services was received from cities and counties, 1-800-CLEANUP, and four supermarket chains: Safeway, Inc., Andronico’s Market, Cala Foods/Bell Market, and Nob Hill.

In-kind services included printing on paper shopping bags and milk cartons, supermarket printed advertising materials, donation of a 1-800 hotline; and county-specific radio, television, and newspaper advertising. Other in-kind services included donation of storage space, office space, mail service, and telephone/fax usage. In-kind services do not include time on the part of individual jurisdictions.

Impacts

The campaign had a significant impact, not only in educating shoppers, but also in influencing buying habits. Sales analysis of product sales at Safeway Stores showed sales of well packaged products (minimal packaging, recycled content) increased by 19.4 percent during the 1996 campaign, while sales of over-packaged products declined by 36 percent. The increase in sales of well-packaged products was considered statistically significant, whereas the decline in sales of over-packaged products was not considered statistically significant since virtually all of the sales decline was in one product category.

In 1999, the paid electronic media campaign (727 radio ads and 953 television ads) resulted in 28,826,829 impressions (which means that, on average, 78 percent of the 5,042,300 adults in the Bay Area saw or heard 5.4 commercials during the campaign). Sixty-one percent of the target audience saw or heard the spots an average of more than 3.3 times. Bonus radio and television spots resulted in several million additional impressions.

Coverage of the campaign included news reports on 2 radio stations, articles in 13 newspapers and other publications, and public service announcements on 25 television stations. Cities and counties also purchased ads in 37 newspapers.

As in previous campaigns, the supermarket chains provided the opportunity to put the messages on paper shopping bags. In addition, in 1999, Safeway printed the message on milk cartons, Nob Hill distributed bag stuffers, Cala Foods included an ad in their coupon book, and all the grocery stores did outreach to their employees.

Table: Campaign Impacts

Staffing/Coordination

A working group of five to seven members coordinates the campaign. The working group, consisting of solid waste and recycling professionals from local government, meets monthly to review and discuss the progress of the campaign. In 1998 and 1999, a program coordinator was hired to handle the day-to-day campaign responsibilities. The part-time coordinator began work on the 1999 campaign in the spring of 1998 and was contracted through February of 1999.

Working group members included: David Assmann (City and County of San Francisco), Bruce Goddard (Alameda County Waste Management Authority), Barbara Lamparter (County of Santa Clara), Ferial Mosely (City of Oakland), Cheri Puls (County of San Mateo), and program coordinators Lisa Jolliffe and Jill Boone. Other Bay Area counties did not send representatives to the working group meetings in 1999, but they actively supported the campaign.

DQ Advertising Group was contracted to coordinate the television and radio buy. Barnes Clarke Inc. (advertising agency of record for the City and County of San Francisco) was used to promote the campaign to the local media. The television ads were produced by Ideas in Motion and the radio ads by Orloff Williams.

The campaign organizers did not set up formal agreements with all the cities and counties, but they used agreements where required. They used San Francisco’s PR agency to make the media buy and generally just used letters as agreements. Some cities and counties required documentation from the PR agency for payments to be made.

The campaign developed a formula for donations and asked cities and counties to contribute what they could, using the formula as a rough guideline. In 1998, they started using the level of financial contributions made as a criterion for determining whether or not to include city and county logos on BART banners and other PR.

The administration has always been handled by a working group, which hires a coordinator as a half-time position year-round. The working group is open to all cities and counties and every city and county can send representatives to the meeting, although they generally have a fairly small group at the monthly meetings (6-12 people on average). The working group tries to ensure that there is representation from as many of the nine counties as possible. During the initial few years, there were also larger meetings with more than 30 people from cities and counties. As the campaign became more established this became less of a requirement.

The financial responsibilities are split among the cities and counties. In 2000, the media buy was handled by San Francisco; the TV and radio production, by Alameda County. Santa Clara County handled payments to the coordinator.

Campaign organizers have tried to keep the structure as informal and flexible as possible in order to minimize the time spent on administration. The coordinator has taken over a lot of the work that was initially done by cities and counties (that is, fundraising from jurisdictions, liaison with the supermarkets and coordinating with the media).

Campaign Recognition

This is clearly a nationally recognized award-winning program. Awards received to date include:

• National Recycling Coalition’s 1996 Beth Brown Boettner Award for Outstanding Public Education.
• 1996 National Association of Counties Achievement Award.
• California Resource Recovery Association’s 1996 Waste Prevention Award.
• Waste Education Partnership Award of Excellence from Local Government Commission and California Integrated Waste Management Board.
• National Awards Council for Environmental Sustainability Certificate of Environmental Achievement.
• Semi-finalist in the Innovations in Government Award-Harvard School of Business and the Ford foundation.
• Trash Cutters Award given by the California Integrated Waste Management Board in partnership with the Local Government Technical Advisory Committee.

Costs, Economics, and Benefits

The startup costs of this campaign in 1995-96 were funded in large part by the Waste Prevention Education Partnership grant from the CIWMB. However, since then local governments throughout the San Francisco Bay Area have pooled their resources to increase the funding for this campaign.

The direct financial contributions of local governments totaled $112,000 in 1996 (excluding in-kind and staff costs). By the fourth year of this program, local governments had contributed approximately $160,000. Direct local contributions (including industry) increased more than 70 percent in the first four years of this campaign, from $113,000 in 1996 to $203,850 in 1999. The campaign funding section of this case study provides a summary of all the contributors to the campaign reported over the past five years. The Media Buy for Save Money and the Environment Too Campaign 2000 table provides a summary of the media buy for the campaign this year, an example of the scope and budgetary magnitude of this effort.

With the startup information made readily available to other communities outside the San Francisco Bay Area, similar programs could probably be started up for much less. The costs of the media buys in other regions would vary by the unit costs for advertising. The San Francisco Bay Area media market is particularly hot now, with all the Internet companies buying all available advertising space. The amount of advertising for this amount of money should be viewed as more than the average media market would require elsewhere.

Table: Campaign Investment to Date

*Of 1997-99, after initial startup grant and costs

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