Post Office, MCA Plan Stamp-Movie Promotion : Ads for Dinosaur Issue Will Mention 1988 Feature Film ‘Land Before Time’
The U.S. Postal Service will help a movie company push sales of its latest video release by offering its newest series of stamps as a promotional tool.
In the first marketing venture between the post office and a private company, the agency will mount a multimillion-dollar ad campaign that simultaneously promotes the stamps depicting dinosaurs and MCA Inc.’s video release of “Land Before Time,” a 1988 feature film about a dinosaur. In turn, the home-video division of MCA, the parent of Universal Pictures, will promote the movie and the stamps in its own ads
The four new dinosaur stamps themselves won’t carry advertising for the movie; they were created before the Postal Service and MCA agreed to the cross-promotion this summer. But the agency will tell consumers about the movie in its television and magazine ads and has given MCA permission to use its eagle logo and facsimiles of the stamps in MCA’s advertising for “Land Before Time.”
Increase Stamp Sales
In addition, MCA will provide buttons to Postal Service employees that show the stamps with the movie’s main character, an animated dinosaur named Littlefoot, and will place promotional material in about 30,000 post offices around the country.
The Postal Service won’t receive any of the proceeds from sales of the videocassettes or from MCA’s use of its stamps and logo, said a spokesman. Instead, the tie-in is designed to increase sales of the dinosaur series during National Stamp Collecting Month.
“The idea is, the more stamps we sell the longer we can go between rate increases,” said Peggy Grant, general manager of the service’s philatelic marketing division. Postmaster General Anthony Frank said recently that first-class postage could be raised to as much as 32 cents to cover a projected $1.5-billion deficit next year.
The Postal Service’s recent efforts to engage the private sector to help it cut costs has met with controversy. In June, Sears Roebuck & Co. kicked the Postal Service out of 11 Sears stores in the Midwest after the American Postal Workers Union charged that Sears employees were running “mini-post offices” in the stores. And earlier this year, several companies complained that the service violated federal contract-bidding procedures by hiring Texas billionaire H. Ross Perot as a consultant. The contract with Perot was eventually nullified.
A congressional staff member familiar with the Postal Service’s operation said the MCA advertising tie-in raised questions about the service. “I don’t know how or where they’re going to draw the line on something like this,” said the staff member, who asked not to be identified. “The Postal Service issued a Lou Gehrig stamp; does that mean someone marketing a baseball movie is going to get a tie-in too? I don’t know whether deals like this make sense.”
No Formal Guidelines
But Michael Laurence, an editor of Linn’s Stamp News, a stamp collectors’ publication, said: “Anything that brings stamp collecting to the attention of a broader audience is a good thing. Everyone in the stamp collecting community wants to sell his stamp collection eventually.”
Grant said the Postal Service has no formal guidelines for establishing commercial tie-ins and is considering other ventures. “We just thought (the movie) had a nice appeal and it was a good fit” with the dinosaur stamps. She added that there has been very little criticism for the MCA venture so far.
