"No advertising, please," write the Swedes on their mailboxes

With one exception, can you guess it?

On a trip to visit my cousins in Skåne, a province in southern Sweden, I was surprised to find attached to every single mailbox, “Ingen reklam, tack.” That is, “No advertising, please.”

In the U.S. the post office would completely ignore your request. You’re getting your offers for discount cigars, quick-to-install gutter guards and new windows with no payments until 2028. What are you, special?

In Sweden, they are required by law to heed your request, putting your desires before commercial interests, if you can imagine that. (That, in a nutshell, is the difference between Europe and the U.S.).

As someone who loves advertising and makes my living creating it, I was not deeply wounded, but amused. Everybody hates advertising, except when they see work they love. And the Swedes create work that’s easy to love, like this brilliant example by Forsman & Bodenfors for Volvo Trucks. When your commercial has its own Wikipedia entry, you’ve done a good job for your client—in fact, it is estimated to have earned over $170M for Volvo. On YouTube, it has been viewed 121 million times.

There is also an ecological component here, too, in that reducing the amount of unwanted mail is less wasteful. This sticker (from skyltmax.se) makes that abundantly clear. Spar på naturen! translates to “Save nature!”

Those fliers and mailers are what keep the U.S. Postal Service kinda-sorta solvent. I mean, what else comes through the mail? Even holiday cards are becoming digital.

So what, then, is the one piece of direct mail some Swedes are willing to make an actual exception for? One that seems entirely understandable, at least to me.

“No advertising, please. But the IKEA catalog is welcome.” Unfortunately, the iconic catalog stopped being printed in 2022, after first appearing in 1950. It used to be delivered to over 100 million mailboxes worldwide. The company decided to concentrate on digital “engagement” instead.

Is there nothing left for our mailboxes but thin New Yorker magazines devoid of advertising?

Don’t you miss the ads that were in it? I do. As Howard Gossage said, “Nobody reads ads. People read what interests them, and sometimes it’s an ad.”

But lo, I came across a sticker that was positive about about advertising, on the sticker site.

“Advertising - Yes please!”

Unfortunately, the next line reads, “Just not today.”