15% REDUCTION IN GOVERNMENT AD SPEND
January 21 2009, 8:55 am | | 10 Comments
Agencies with larger government accounts are in for a tough time over the next year with the State Government instructing government departments to cut back ad spend by 15 per cent.
WA Business News reported that in addition to the 15 per cent cut, the use of consultants was also being reigned in by $5 million. Business News reported that the State Government is looking to save around $6.4 million from it’s advertising budgets this year. Read the full story here.

10 Comments
should rename this article “15% reduction in WA’s overall ad spend”
A good start would be to ban VB creating any more Teaching WA work.
Someone’s dragging the good old VB name through the mud.
Some deluded people may need to think hard about those not working in our industry who government clients rely on for market research about the way campaigns and creative go. Some agencies are lucky enough to have clients (Ikea etc) who embrace new, sexy and creative ideas; some who get Fed contracts that can earn you a couple of million bucks a year for doin sweet FA, but tests well in research get mucho bucks for knowing the target market – ie Billy Balga & Connie Cottesloe.Fair play to 303 for their obesity campaign, fair play to vb for their teaching campaign. Fair play to Rare for their Communities ad, and fair play to whoever for their nursing ads: wish they had a couple more million to expand it though. Making money for WA agencies is good for all of us, so why slate a fed/state ad when we know nothing about the brief, demographics,client and research etc?
How did the red rooster ads get slated on this site so much when thats a corporate client, yet state/fed stuff that people have very little control on get slated more. Zages did both red rooster and teaching so go figure, only research can prove it; but we never talk about it on here, just slate each other.
Grow up guys.
ThE KiD
ThE KID.
You write awkwardly and you logic is hard to follow but you hit on a central problem with this blog. It’s mainly inhabited by immature, self-serving twats whose slavish adherence to their own – and even worse – their agencies interests, results in a turgid, stagnant backwater that has singularly failed to capture the imagination of anyone outside Dullsville. Until the blog owners start cutting back on the inelegant vitriol and encouraging informed and rational debate, it will remain a sad knocking shop for the serially self-obsessed
Actually, you’re both wrong. There are plenty of intelligent, well-thought-out comments on here by people who know our industry well. Some of them make good points and raise issues worth discussing. Of course there are some mindless dicks that go in unnecessarily hard, or write immature rants, but you are always going to get those guys – the trick is to ignore them and move on. Remember too that some folks write stuff to deliberately get a rise out of people, they want a bitch-fight. You don’t always have to bite.
5.34, the whole ‘Dullsville’ thing is such a cop out, cliché. Whose imagination are we suppose to be capturing? Yours? Put the thesaurus away and get over yourself.
Oh, and ThE KID, if you’re really the ‘WA Voice of Reason’ you might need to work a bit harder at the ‘reason’ part, your diatribe is pretty confusing mate.
Next…
What the hell is this government doing? Private sector expenditure is falling (and I am not just talking about in the marketing sector) and so the state government cuts spending too while every other government in the world is trying to avoid a nosedive by putting liquidity into the system.
This treasurer is going to bring a lot of small business to the wall with these policies. They have put billions in infrastructure projects on hold and architects and engineers are heading to the dole lines.
Commodity prices will come back one day and until then it is the government’s responsibility to smooth the bumps as much as possible, not to make things rougher. If that means borrowing in the short term then we can afford to do it because we have the assets (resources) to support it. It may not be politically popular but it is responsible.
And The Kid – I hope to God you are an art director.
7.50 you just proved my point brilliantly.
The Kid,
What does Mark Zagar have to do with your argument? Both ads (Red Rooster and Teachers) are well made, professional looking spots. As you would expect from Mark/Sauce, and no one has said otherwise. It is the content that has been criticised and for mine rightly so – they are both very average (and very tired) ideas.
I’m sorry, I really don’t follow any of your argument. … The voice of reason you are not.
The GRanDAd.
You proved my point brilliantly. Ad hominem attacks are hardly the height of sophistication now, are they?
5.34am