Ad Cull

From The Independent:

"Faced with a choice of funding more police officers on the streets or buying more advertising, Johnson seems to favour the former. The estimated £16.5m cost of his policy of more officers patrolling Tube stations and buses will steal money from the Transport for London and Metropolitan Police ad budgets.

The Tories have made a habit of complaining about the use of taxpayers' money to promote government policy, so Johnson's knee-jerk is not so surprising. And it is quite hard to argue with. But he would be wise to consider the effectiveness of some of the GLA's campaigns before he raids the advertising coffers further.

Driver awareness campaigns for TfL, anti-gun campaigns for the police's Trident initiative – ad campaigns such as these have been meticulously researched, planned and executed and, as a consequence, they have made a real impact on their respective targets, with proven results. What is more, they have been seen by an awful lot more people than the extra officers spread across the sprawling transport system will be."

It's the second item down.

Comments

[Phil Taylor]

Dave,

The writer probably doesn't know that the old Mayor's total comms spending was about £100 million. For instance, £3 million to promote the Tour de France. £3.3 million to run the LEZ and Emissions Related Congestion Charging consultations (which were essentially ad campaigns with consultations attached).

So the Mayor spent £100 million out of a total expenditure in the order of £10 billion, ie 1%.

My local Authority spent about £3 million on publicity in 2006/7 out of total expenditure of about £900 million, ie 0.33%.

The Central Office of Information, which is essentially a central advertising clearing house for the government, spent £338 million in 2006/7 in the context of total managed expenditure by government of about £550 billion, ie 0.06%.

Government spends a lot more on comms outside the COI but I think we have shown that the Mayor was raping and pillaging. While some GLA body campaigns were no doubt worthwhile there was way too much of it.