Every day more and more taxpayers money is wasted on what can only be described as fluff.
This government seems to think the best way to solve a problem is to spend money on advertising.
The Road to Zero campaign is a classic case in point. Are they planning to build safer roads? Maybe, but not for a while, but for now let’s spend a few hundred thousand on some TV advertising telling people to drive safer.
Now we have news of a campaign called “Every School Day is a Big Day.” It was started last August with the aim of getting more kids to school so to improve attendance statistics.
The advertising agency given the job was the Waitapu Group, which included some work from one its subsidiaries Tatou NZ.
That particular agency is run by Sky Kimura, the partner of Associate Health Minister Peeni Henare. Tatou NZ recently earned $250,000 for some Health Ministry work.
This campaign on truancy, which cost the Ministry of Education a million dollars, included a workshop with the agency but there were no briefing documents prepared so the taxpayer could see what was trying to be achieved here.
But, according to an official information request, the campaign was about raising awareness of the need to go to school but “was not expected to have a direct quantifiable impact on attendance rates.”
No data on attendance rates during and after the campaign was collected anyway.
This is just ludicrous.
In summary, you spend a million dollars on an advertising campaign to get kids to school, don’t leave a written brief about the campaign with the agency, and then don’t collect data to see if the campaign is effective.
Is there no financial accountability for expenditure at the Ministry of Education?
It is another wasted million dollars.
But then if there’s one thing this government is good at, it’s wasting money.
Peter Williams was a writer and broadcaster for half a century. Now watching from the sidelines. Peter blogs regularly on Peter’s Substack where this article was sourced.
The advertising agency given the job was the Waitapu Group, which included some work from one its subsidiaries Tatou NZ.
That particular agency is run by Sky Kimura, the partner of Associate Health Minister Peeni Henare. Tatou NZ recently earned $250,000 for some Health Ministry work.
This campaign on truancy, which cost the Ministry of Education a million dollars, included a workshop with the agency but there were no briefing documents prepared so the taxpayer could see what was trying to be achieved here.
But, according to an official information request, the campaign was about raising awareness of the need to go to school but “was not expected to have a direct quantifiable impact on attendance rates.”
No data on attendance rates during and after the campaign was collected anyway.
This is just ludicrous.
In summary, you spend a million dollars on an advertising campaign to get kids to school, don’t leave a written brief about the campaign with the agency, and then don’t collect data to see if the campaign is effective.
Is there no financial accountability for expenditure at the Ministry of Education?
It is another wasted million dollars.
But then if there’s one thing this government is good at, it’s wasting money.
Peter Williams was a writer and broadcaster for half a century. Now watching from the sidelines. Peter blogs regularly on Peter’s Substack where this article was sourced.
1 comment:
Giving money to media via advertising is just another enhancement of the PJI funding model. It is designed to give the media more reason to love this government because all government advertising is frankly useless if it has no outcomes recorded.
We have seem nearly 6 years of wasted advertising tax payer dollars.
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