Category: Communications disease

The Evening Standard is today reporting on the cost of the Mayor’s silly spat with Trevor Phillips. Apparently TfL had signed up as a sponsor of the Commission for Racial Equality’s conference, starting in London today, to mark 30 years since the Race Relations Act. They have spent £27,000 on this and as a result of the Mayor pulling out of the conference and using it as an opportunity to slag off Phillips TfL have had to withdraw too. The Livingstone pulls out story was covered on the Today programme this morning (see online version).

I guess that if TfL have a £78 million comms budget then the idea of sponsoring such a high profile conference would be attractive. It is pretty hard to spend that much cash on marketing, PR, etc unless you spend some big lumps on pretty marginal rubbish. Some mug comms guy at Barclays has also convinced his bosses that it might be a good way of showing corporate social responsibility. I can’t think of any sound marketing reason for sponsoring a conference like this. It must be pretty hard to argue what audience you are reaching and what messages you might be trying to convey to them. I don’t suppose TfL waste much time on that kind of discipline.

Anyway, you might imagine that TfL was independent enough from the Mayor to be able to continue even if the Mayor pulled out, but no. Livingstone’s ego is so big he thinks that wasting £27K to underline his point is of no consequence.

The biggest spender on advertsing during the last general election campaign was the Tory party. It spent £8.2 million. They do this every four or five years to try to persuade the whole country to vote for them. Whatever you think about the Tories’ donors most of this cash comes from little people paying their subs. I’m one of them. £50 a year. See the Electoral Commission website.

A couple of weeks ago the Evening Standard reported that the London Mayor, Ken Livingstone, was going to spit in our faces by spending £8.7 million on telling us about his unwanted extension to the Congestion Charge, an extension that will probably ensure that no surplus is generated from the stupid tax for many years. I did not really take the information in. This weekend I saw a billboard in South Ealing Road, a TV advert and a double page spread in the Londoner. It is fully four months until this change comes into force yet Livingstone is using £8.7 million of our cash to ram his scheme down our throats.

The contrast between the Nelson Room and the City Hall chamber could not be greater. Sitting on the sumptuous suede effect gallery seats, surrounded by state of the art audio visual equipment my only complaint was that I was too cold. The Mayor is getting very windy on the subject of carbon but perhaps he could turn down the aircon a couple of notches.

The main topic for the first hour or so were the TfL price increases. Nobody had spotted Livingstone’s RPI wheeze. There was much talk of mitigating the effect of these above inflation rises on poorer Londoners but the fact is that if you don’t get onto Oyster TfL are going to plunder you. In many ways the Mayor comes across as an extremely bright and capable man. He then blows it by describing how his weird oil deal with Venezuela is going to help poor Londoners.

Tory spokesman for transport, Roger Evans, asked a question following up on the £78 million number that I got out of TfL:

“Why is the budget for TfL’s ‘Advertising, marketing and communications’ £78 million? Why do you think it is necessary for a public body that provides a monopoly service to spend such an amount on advertising?”

The Mayor tried to pretend that this was a small sum compared to overall TfL spending and to justify it in terms it being spent on things like timetables. In his breakdown of this spending he still had to admit that £40 million goes on advertising.

The Mayor admitted that this figure was a £14 million overspend on this budget and that he would expect to see spending in the same ballpark next year. The self-promotion goes on.

One of TfL’s expensive ads warns young people that if they misbehave on public transport they will lose their travelcard. The Mayor admitted today that only 4 cards had been withdrawn in a year. I can’t see this measure stopping many hoodies from scratching up bus windows.

I was interested to see this component of London democracy in action but it was pretty poor sport. Although Livingstone was suffering from a cough he seemed happy enough batting away the questions of the assembly member. Incidentally our member, Richard Barnes was not present.

Although not quite the marathon that the EAC was it still went on for 2 hours 37 minutes – not for the faint hearted.

This month sees a battle royal between the Daily Mail/Northcliffe publishing empire and Murdoch’s over who owns London daily newspaper publishing. This week saw the launch of News International’s thelondonpaper, a new free sheet. The DMGT Evening Standard has put its price up to 50p and launched London Lite as a free sheet a few days ahead of thelondonpaper to try and kill it at birth.

This contest will all come down to money. The biggest ad spender by far in London is Livingstone with his £100 million budget (see previous post). The way he places his spending over the next few months will determine our reading for many years to come.

The Standard is under real threat. Although it is far from being perfect it is at least a real London newspaper with some shreds of journalistic integrity. Both the new freesheets and the Metro (a joint venture with TfL) are just gossip sheets with snippets of news off wire services. The Mayor hates the Standard and has the market power to crush it. Yesterday the Mayor’s TfL put 2 full pages of ads in thelondonpaper and none in the Standard or London Lite. I am sure he welcomes the opportunity to punish the Standard.

The Mayor and TfL have huge market power as customers but are also market participants. TfL has its JV with the Metro. The Londoner is the Mayor’s own £3 million freesheet delivered to all London homes. How can the Standard compete when its main customer wants to publish newspapers at tax payer’s expense and is happy to push advertising to newspapers with no journalists?

The Mayor and TfL should get out of newspaper publishing entirely. The conflict of interests is unacceptable. They also need to stand aside in the current newspaper war and ensure that they do not use their spending power to destroy London’s one real newspaper just so that they can avoid a bit of criticism.

I have today written to the Director of Competition Enforcement at the Office of Fair trading to request that they review the London newspaper market.

See Dan Sabbagh writing in the Times yesterday.

The Telegraph today reports that the state is emplying 3,200 press officers.

This includes 69 in the Metropolitan Police (not-force-but) Service and 25 in Transport for London.