We call upon the Edinburgh Fringe Society to ban the distribution of flyers by companies who have registered for the Edinburgh Fringe.

These unsightly rectangles of card are distributed by companies to market their shows to no great success, and mostly end up in landfill or all over the streets. They make Edinburgh messy, and have an unnecessary environmental impact.

To ask companies to unilaterally stop would be unfair, since they would put themselves at a disadvantage. Only a blanket ban would stop the promiscuous free trade in bits of card.

The Fringe is the world’s largest arts market, and probably the unofficial global capital of inefficient marketing. The Fringe office still recommends that in person marketing is a vibrant tool to get a show noticed. The consequence is the printing and distribution of flyers, which end up, like the dreams of young companies and artistic integrity, in tatters by the end of August.

My objections are on four levels: the environmental impact of the flyers; the amount of mess they make in the city; their limitations as carriers of information or effective marketing; the exploitation of workers and the waste of human labour in distributing them. There is also the philosophical problem that they encourage the already existing competition between artists, as each show begs for attention against their rivals in rubbish redistribution.

There is, of course, the popular Fringe myth that flyers became sentient and designed the Edinburgh Fringe to reproduce. Like the relationship between reviews and adverts in magazines, the apparent importance of producing a show is really an imperative from the flyers, who want more shows to act like honeybees, distributing their toxic pollen over the city. It seems that the magazine is all about the content, but the articles are really only a pretty frame for the advertisements. That Brechtian drama only serves as the host for A6 slivers of paper.

The Environment

The Edinburgh Fringe recommends that shows ‘think in the low thousands’ when ordering flyers. Assuming that each of the 4000 shows orders just 1000 flyers, that’s 4,000,000 flyers. With a 160 gsm (a low paper-weight for flyers) flyer with weighing 2.5 g, that’s 10 tonnes of paper waste that just ends up in the bin. This also assumes the lowest recommended number of flyers, and the smaller flyer size

http://www.thegreenhousetheatre.com (2019)

This may or may not represent a serious contribution to global waste, but it does not suggest that the Fringe is helping the problem.  It may just be another example of my wishy-washy politics, but my sense is that removing flyers from the Fringe would at least demonstrate an active engagement with sustainability.

The Mess

I did intend to grab an image from the internet showing the Fringe a few years ago, when the bin collectors went on strike and the city looked a right midden. However, if you are reading this at the Fringe in 2025, just take a look around. This one is self-evident.

Limitations

At the risk of sounding like a conspiracy theorist, I invite the reader to do their own research: take the nearest flyer and explore its text. It ought to have a nice picture, the times and dates, and a few salient star ratings (something else that is a blight on creativity). It’s functional, and some of them are even beautiful. But does it really sell the show? Can it replace an article about the top best shows about cats?

For the artists, there is the possibility that flyers do not lead to closing a sale. Does the number of flyers distributed correlate to attendance? Is it effective as a marketing strategy? How many hours of human labour does it require to sell one ticket? Do the costs even generate enough revenue to pay for the printing?

Exploitation

Brian Ferguson wrote an article about the experience of flyering for The Herald in 2024. I am not in the business of raw plagiarism, or hard work, so I vaguely direct towards his piece and encourage audiences to look into the eyes of that earnest young comedian who is touting their show. They might look sprightly and fun, but is that a forced grin and the pinhole eyes of a broken jester. They say the tears of a clown are tragic, but when they can’t cry anymore, it’s the end of times.