Government won't release info on how successful campaign was
The federal government spent $2.8 million on radio and print advertising last June to inform Canadians about the next phase of its Economic Action Plan. But according to research posted to a government website, only 12 per cent of us could recall any of the ads.
Does that mean the campaign was a failure? It's hard to tell, because the government is refusing to release the benchmarks it uses to assess the effectiveness of its taxpayer-funded advertising.
By policy, government departments must survey Canadians to evaluate the impact of advertising campaigns with media buys of more than $1 million. They must also post reports about all polls they commission on Library and Archives Canada's website within six months of completion.
But those reports no longer include any evaluation of an advertising campaign's success, or even a summary of the poll's findings. Instead, all that's posted are the survey's methodology and dozens of pages of tables recording responses to questions, in microscopic type.
The disappearance of the summary and evaluation material coincides with a move about two years ago by the Privy Council Office (PCO) to take over the analysis of the advertising survey instrument, called the Advertising Campaign Evaluation Tool (ACET).
The PCO, which controls the main advertising budget used to fund individual departmental campaigns, shares its evaluations with the departments involved - but not, it appears, with the public, whose tax dollars pay for the ads.
In September, the Citizen filed three Access to Information requests asking for PCO's analysis of an $8-million Health Canada advertising campaign promoting children's health and safety.
As the Citizen reported in August, fewer than four in 10 could remember seeing any of the high-profile multimedia campaign's advertisements, a recall rate that marketing experts described as low.
But the documents released by the PCO and Health Canada in response to the Citizen's request shed no light on whether the government considered the campaign a success or a failure. Sections showing the ACET benchmarks used to make that assessment were blanked out.
In withholding the benchmarks, PCO and Health Canada access to information officers cited several exemptions under the Access to Information Act. One allows departments to withhold information dealing with the operations of government. Another exemption says they may refuse to disclose information about testing or auditing procedures "if the disclosure would prejudice the use or results of particular tests or audits."
In an interview, Alisdair Roberts, a Canadian professor at Suffolk University Law School in Boston who has written extensively about government secrecy, said using the act's tests and audits exemption to withhold evaluations of government programs "seems a little odd."
"That's usually done to withhold information that might compromise the integrity of a testing process," Roberts said. "But when you're evaluating a government-funded activity, you don't want to withhold the standards that you use to evaluate the program. The rationale for the exemption doesn't seem to apply in this case."
Does that mean the campaign was a failure? It's hard to tell, because the government is refusing to release the benchmarks it uses to assess the effectiveness of its taxpayer-funded advertising.
By policy, government departments must survey Canadians to evaluate the impact of advertising campaigns with media buys of more than $1 million. They must also post reports about all polls they commission on Library and Archives Canada's website within six months of completion.
But those reports no longer include any evaluation of an advertising campaign's success, or even a summary of the poll's findings. Instead, all that's posted are the survey's methodology and dozens of pages of tables recording responses to questions, in microscopic type.
The disappearance of the summary and evaluation material coincides with a move about two years ago by the Privy Council Office (PCO) to take over the analysis of the advertising survey instrument, called the Advertising Campaign Evaluation Tool (ACET).
The PCO, which controls the main advertising budget used to fund individual departmental campaigns, shares its evaluations with the departments involved - but not, it appears, with the public, whose tax dollars pay for the ads.
In September, the Citizen filed three Access to Information requests asking for PCO's analysis of an $8-million Health Canada advertising campaign promoting children's health and safety.
As the Citizen reported in August, fewer than four in 10 could remember seeing any of the high-profile multimedia campaign's advertisements, a recall rate that marketing experts described as low.
But the documents released by the PCO and Health Canada in response to the Citizen's request shed no light on whether the government considered the campaign a success or a failure. Sections showing the ACET benchmarks used to make that assessment were blanked out.
In withholding the benchmarks, PCO and Health Canada access to information officers cited several exemptions under the Access to Information Act. One allows departments to withhold information dealing with the operations of government. Another exemption says they may refuse to disclose information about testing or auditing procedures "if the disclosure would prejudice the use or results of particular tests or audits."
In an interview, Alisdair Roberts, a Canadian professor at Suffolk University Law School in Boston who has written extensively about government secrecy, said using the act's tests and audits exemption to withhold evaluations of government programs "seems a little odd."
"That's usually done to withhold information that might compromise the integrity of a testing process," Roberts said. "But when you're evaluating a government-funded activity, you don't want to withhold the standards that you use to evaluate the program. The rationale for the exemption doesn't seem to apply in this case."
A heavily redacted 2009 report by PCO, released under Access to Information, says ACET's main goal is to "ensure consistency in advertising evaluations across government departments in order to allow for review of campaign performances."
But within government, there's widespread dissatisfaction with ACET, which is seen by many as an out-ofdate methodology that reveals little of value. Moreover, the cost of conducting ACET surveys apparently eats up as much as half of the rapidly diminishing sum the government now spends on polling Canadians.
The report on the $2.8-million Economic Action Plan ad campaign - which included nine 30-second radio ads and two print ads that appeared in weekly newspapers - typifies the sort of information the government now releases about its advertising efforts.
It includes a brief introduction by Harris/Decima, the firm that conducted the $29,600 ACET survey, five pages about the survey methodology, a list of the questions asked and 60 pages of tables summarizing the results. But nowhere is there a summary of the findings or an assessment of the campaign's effectiveness.
Absent those, it's hard to know if the campaign met its objectives. But to the layman's eye, it does not appear to have been very successful. Just 13 per cent of the 1,013 surveyed had even heard of the next phase of the government's Economic Action Plan, which was unveiled in the June federal budget. Of that small number, nearly six in 10 couldn't name a single one of its 20 or so initiatives.
The survey is considered accurate to within plus or minus 3.1 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.
But within government, there's widespread dissatisfaction with ACET, which is seen by many as an out-ofdate methodology that reveals little of value. Moreover, the cost of conducting ACET surveys apparently eats up as much as half of the rapidly diminishing sum the government now spends on polling Canadians.
The report on the $2.8-million Economic Action Plan ad campaign - which included nine 30-second radio ads and two print ads that appeared in weekly newspapers - typifies the sort of information the government now releases about its advertising efforts.
It includes a brief introduction by Harris/Decima, the firm that conducted the $29,600 ACET survey, five pages about the survey methodology, a list of the questions asked and 60 pages of tables summarizing the results. But nowhere is there a summary of the findings or an assessment of the campaign's effectiveness.
Absent those, it's hard to know if the campaign met its objectives. But to the layman's eye, it does not appear to have been very successful. Just 13 per cent of the 1,013 surveyed had even heard of the next phase of the government's Economic Action Plan, which was unveiled in the June federal budget. Of that small number, nearly six in 10 couldn't name a single one of its 20 or so initiatives.
The survey is considered accurate to within plus or minus 3.1 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.
Original Article
Source: Ottawa Citizen
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