The Australian Paper Industry Association (APIA) is calling for “partner associations” to help fund and take part in its ‘Paper: Part of Every Day’ campaign.
At a campaign strategy briefing in Sydney on Tuesday, APIA chairman Bernard Cassell proposed the launch of a ‘Campaign Steering Committee’, to be made up of representatives from APIA and “at least three” other industry associations.
At the meeting, attended by ProPrint, Printing Industries national president Jim Atkinson and GASAA executive director Garry Knespal both expressed an interest in collaborating on the campaign and the drive to raise funds.
“We’ve got to be seen to be holding hands on this,” Atkinson said.
APIA has already committed $100,000 to the campaign, which it raised through its $3,000 membership fees. However, this amount will only fund a “minimum level campaign”, according to Fitzpatrick Woods Consulting principal Tim Woods, who is helping devise and run the campaign.
Woods outlined the campaign’s plan for 2010, which will involve the use of print media advertisements, governmental and media lobbying, regular industry briefings, and online marketing through the campaign website.
Woods’ brief is to develop a campaign to “promote and defend” the industry. He will address an “under-sell” of print’s sustainability credentials as well as combating misconceptions about them.
“We are the only industry that, by its nature, plants trees,” said Cassell. “It’s a story we need to get out.”
John Dee’s Paperless Alliance is firmly in the sights of the campaign. Woods claimed the campaign had already succeeded in lobbying the ACCC to investigate Dee’s claims about the paper industry’s sustainability.
A vital aspect of the 2010 campaign strategy will be to issue “formal complaints” against people the association believes have unfairly vilified the industry.
Woods said that the industry so far had failed to respond to the claim that “we’re all a bunch of tree murderers”.
“When you fail to respond, people think you agree,” he said.
Woods said a focus group study had found that the wider public’s main objection to print is focused specifically on the use of paper, rather than the printing process itself.
“People think about the fibre chain, they have serious misconceptions about fibre, and that’s where the public objection comes from,” he said.
“We have to get people past their objections to paper, and we have to start with the people in our own industry.”
Woods acknowledged the irony of using a website and email lists to promote print, as well as being a little embarrassed that the association’s report on printed communications is available electronically, but not in a printed format.
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